


eyes brighter than their crown

by pigeonfancier



Series: BRIGHT AS THE MORNING SUN [1]
Category: The Blackout Club (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gaslighting, Gen, Religious Cults
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24008101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonfancier/pseuds/pigeonfancier
Summary: “Gosh. We? And who am I speaking to?” Lavi says, sugary sweet, for all that their stomach is sinking right past their feet and into the roots of the tree. “Tommy, or Thee-I-Dare?”Tommy’s brow furrows, just for a moment. Then his expression smoothes. “Does it matter?”Lavanya Vankamamidi's always been intrigued by magic, secrets, and things they aren't necessarily supposed to know. When they discover that Redacre has a cult living under its hills, and that it's filled with daimons, mysterious creatures capable of controlling one's mind, they're more excited than they are frightened. But it's hard to view things as a game when the stakes keep raising.. and when they find out that their family are all on the wrong side of the war that's beginning to brew throughout the town.A story of how Lavi starts off with the Blackout Club, and sides with Speak-as-One instead.
Series: BRIGHT AS THE MORNING SUN [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1787071
Kudos: 17





	eyes brighter than their crown

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to part one of two of **EYES BRIGHTER THAN THEIR CROWN.** This deals with Lavi’s first four months in the Blackout Club - or, in short, how a kid decides to side with SAO, contrary to common sense, common decency, and peer pressure.  
> This is set in the same direct universe as my other TBC fics, and the order roughly goes:
> 
> **EYES BRIGHTER THAN THEIR CROWN** (April - July - Lavi follows Speak-as-One)  
>  **LIKE A FIRE IN THE DARK** (August - Anya discovers the daimons, and joins The Blackout Club)  
>  **IN THE FIRE AND THE FLOOD** (October - Anya POV, WIP)  
>  **TO IMPOSE A WORLD OF PEACE** (August - October: Lavi POV, coming to a store near you!)
> 
> Anya’s fic is written so that people who aren’t familiar with the fandom can keep up with it, but that is not the case with this one. I expect one can follow the gist of it well enough, but there’s no real explanations of the material, in the name of this not being fucking 50k. With that said, while the timeline in this follows the games’ timeline, but only roughly: there’s a lot of quiet shifting and compression to make this all happen within a much, much shorter period of time.
> 
> Xaviul Neptune belongs to [Xav@Twitter](http://twitter.com/xav1ul), Astro belongs to [kidskylark@AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kidskylark/pseuds/kidskylark), and the oft-mentioned Skeg and Archer belong to [Skegulium@AO3.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skegulium) Call-outs to them for being gorgeous, lovely people who beta’d this hot mess for me, and without whom I undoubtedly would have just thrown this on the forever-wip pile. Thank you! You’re all lovely, wonderful people that I adore!  
> [The Boxcar Children Aren't Alright](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18440474/chapters/43683563) by **Kidskylark** features Astro as the POV, and [Let Us Be Bold](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18022100) by **Skegulium** features Archer as the POV. Go check them out! :)

## OCTOBER 31ST, 2███

"Speak-as-One," they say, and their voice rasps in the darkness.

There’s moonlight streaming from between the trees, but it’s just enough light to make the shadows look darker. It’s just enough light to make their eyes weep from it, Lavi thinks, but there’s sticks and twigs in the dirt underneath them, large enough, _sharp_ enough that they can feel the jut of them against bone. Maybe it’s not the light, after all.

"Speak-as-One," they try again, and: “- _please -”_

But there's still only silence.

* * *

# SPRING

* * *

## APRIL 1ST, 2███

The first time they'd met it - _them_ \- it had gone something like this:

It was two in the morning, in the darkest part of the night, and Lavi was trying to pry open the Vaughan’s front door with a bobbypin they’d stolen from their father’s theatre. When they’d nicked the bobbypin, they hadn’t figured it would be a hard task! They’ve spent the past two months practicing with lockpicks in the clubhouse, on every assorted little lock that the members had brought, and everything had been easy, when they’d had _picks._

Gwenna had stopped giving them picks as of a week ago. “If you can’t keep _track of them,”_ she’d said, flat, “then you don’t get to have them. It’s not like we can order them from the store, Lavanya.”

Like they’d been losing them on purpose!

Marie had laughed in their face when they’d asked _her_ for some picks, so they’d told Marie that they’d go and get help elsewhere, if they needed to, thank you very much! Maybe Lavi would go pleading to Thee-I-Dare, and _he’d_ scrounge them up a lockpick, or Laugh-Last, or even Speak-as-One. And they’d both laughed, though Marie had flinched at the name.

“You’re not supposed to say it,” she’d scolded, but -

What was the harm? It was a name. It wasn’t _Harry Potter,_ and Lavi didn’t see the point in pretending, no matter how strange the town was beginning to get. Bells had disappeared, sure, and things were _talking_ to some of the kids, and there were adults roaming the street at night, dead to the world - but there was a far leap between that, and between _magic._

Lavi isn’t quite sure they _believe_ in magic, all things considered. They’d proven Santa was a lie scarcely a week after their parents had told them, and the Tooth Fairy’s generosity, as it turned out, was linked explicitly to their mother’s patience. They’d lured Lakshmi into every mushroom circle they’d found after she’d first started walking, and nothing had ever come of _that,_ and everyone knew that sleepwalking was just a disorder of the mind.

There might just be lead in the pipes of Redacre, to cause it in so many people. Lavi had read once that lead caused sores on your brain that led to all _sorts_ of behavioral problems. They’re not entirely sure what that meant, but, they’d reasoned, sleepwalking was a problem if there ever was one.

After all, Gwenna had once woken up on the _traintracks._

But they don’t _want_ it to be something like that, Lavi thinks, if they’re honest. There’s something so much more romantic and interesting if it was all magic, and so when Marie had said that some people were hearing things in the nights - demons, angels, noises and sights that didn’t come from anything they’d known - Lavi had been so _excited._ They’d read dozens and dozens of books along those lines, filled with bright-eyed protagonists and their smoldering, brilliant counterpoints, and.. there’s a lot of children in the town! There’d been half a dozen in the club, when they’d first joined, and the ranks have been filling, ever since Madi-Shaw ran away. And Madi-Shaw had always had such a big personality, and taken up so much _room._ Without her, the club’s felt empty.

It’s felt like a story without a lead. And they don’t think of themself as vain, really, but..

Out of all the children in Redacre, Lavi thinks that they might have been born for the role.

They just hadn’t expected it’d include committing _crimes._

Bobby pins are clumsy, but they work, if Lavi's careful. They use them to break into their fathers study all the time, and houselocks aren't _too_ much harder. They just need to concentrate, and that's not so hard, when no one else is around to gabber and distract, and all they have to listen to is the chirp of crickets and birds off in the distance. 

Prior to the quarantine, they think, there might’ve been people racing about Redacre, even at this time of night. But the streets empty out at sundown, now, and no one’s working nights. The entire town are supposed to be in their beds, sleeping, and for the most part, they are.

Lavi isn’t. The residents of this _house_ aren’t. But that’s just fine, because Lavi’d spotted them, their eyes firmly closed, their gestures stiff in that way they’ve come to associate with the sleepers, trying to scrub their back deck. They hadn’t noticed them at all, not even when Lavi had cleared their throat, just to see, and so the soft click-slide of the bobbypin shouldn’t draw them out, either.

The only thing that Lavi needs to worry about, honestly, is the lock, and that makes concentrating _easy._

At least, concentrating is easy when they don't have hair in their _eyes._

With a huff, Lavi sets down their bobbypin on the ground. “I’m going to cut you off,” they complain, soft enough that it shouldn’t stir the sleepers. Normally, they’d just ignore it, and it’d go away: most things did, they’ve found, if you just ignore them long enough. But their eye doesn’t just have a hair in it. It feels like it has two or three, all long and sharp-edged enough that their eye is _twitching,_ too tedious to ever possibly ignore.

They _are_ going to lop off their hair, they decide, stepping back from the door. They’re going to get it _buzzed,_ just like Marie, and then they’ll never to deal with this _again._ Their eye’s moved right past twitching and into tearing up, like it’s just trying to be as aggravating as possible. So Lavi braces themself, squeezes their other eye shut, and reaches up -

There's words.

Lavi screams, and jolts back.

They don’t so much slip down the porch steps as they _slide:_ one moment, they’re at the top, and the next, they’re sitting on the concrete, their rear smarting and their heart racing. There’s pain coursing right from their tailbone through to the rest of them, sharp enough that, suddenly, they don’t care about their eye at all.

“Fuck,” they say quietly, pushing themself up. Their palms are wet. They must’ve slid on the concrete, trying to catch themself. “Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck -_ ”

The gate smashes open. Jocasta Vaughan’s a big woman, but her husband’s maybe twice her width, with shoulders very nearly as broad as the door Lavi was trying to pick. He charges forward, head swinging like a bull, but he stops at the end of the little garden path. His head tilts, like he’s trying to hear something.

Lavi’s heart is racing, but they don’t let themself move. They hold perfectly still, and they hold their breath.

Behind him, Jocasta’s shoulders slump. The tension unwinds from her body, and it’s almost like watching someone cut a puppet’s strings: there’s so much less _life_ in her, now. And in front of her, her husband is doing the same, his posture relaxing as he straightens back up.

Very, very carefully, Lavi slides back on the concrete of their walkway, and towards the far end of the lawn. The sleepers don’t stir as they place their first foot on the grass, and then their next - and then Lavi’s free to straighten up, and for the first time in what feels like an eternity, breathe.

They’d seen letters, when they’d closed their eyes. Their heart is beating hard enough they can practically _taste it_ in their mouth, but it’s not just fear, they think: it’s iron and fear and _excitement,_ under all of it.

They’d _wanted_ it to be real, when Marie had told them about the voices, and the letters, and the _things_ that the other kids were hearing. Lavi had wanted it so badly, but they hadn’t actually believed it.

Carefully, they take another step back. The sleepers aren’t paying them any mind, but Lavi’s still meticulously quiet as they slide off their sneakers, climb atop of their station wagon, and slowly - gently - slide onto their roof. It’s only when they’re safely sequestered on top of the roof that they sit down.

Lavi’s seen what’s happened to the kids that get grabbed by the sleepers. Marie had come back with roadrash all over her legs, wide, cherry-red streaks of pain and bruises across her wrists where they’d tried to drag her. They’ve seen the bruises around Tommy’s neck.

When they close their eyes, they want to be somewhere _safe,_ somewhere that no one can sneak up on them and grab them while they’re distracted. The sleepers are milling around towards the front of the house, but they’re too big to get on the roof. Lavi’s safe up here, as safe as they could hope to be.

This time, when they close their eyes, it's like looking at a neon sign. The other kids had warned them! "It hurts, chico," Marie had told them, her cheeks dimpling. "Like looking into the sun. I don't think we're meant to see it."

"But it's worth it," Tommy had chimed in, with the fervency of a believer.

It doesn’t _feel_ worth it. It feels like something’s trying to brand their eyes, a heat that almost feels _physical,_ and Lavi has to swallow back curses when they rip open their eyes. The shape of the words don’t want to go away, no matter how much they blink. They sit there like sunspots, vivid green-black reminders, and -

They’ve had their fill, they decide suddenly. Their throat’s tight with something that feels close to fear, and the excitement of it all is draining out of them, as quickly as it came. They’d doubted the other kids, just a little, and now they’ve seen proof that 

Their throat _hurts._ Lavi swallows hard, and when that doesn’t help, they try a soft, quiet cough. They try for one, but it doesn’t quite happen. “The child spoke our name," is what comes out instead when they open their mouth, and Lavi clamps their jaw shut, pressing both hands over it.

Jocasta looks up, her mouth a thin slash, and Lavi can't see her eyes. But her face is pointed directly at them.

There's a high whine coming from their throat, but at least _that_ , Lavi knows, is their own.

"Don't _fleshpuppet_ me!" they whisper, furious, and there's the pressure again. It wasn’t a hair in their eye at _all,_ they’re starting to realise. But that’s fine. They can just - _ignore it,_ then, the way they ought’ve from the start. It should be easy. Lavi’s always been good at ignoring things.

They last a full thirty seconds before they blink.

But their eyes are open again a moment later, too quick to see more than _citrus,_ bright enough to burn. This time, they keep their mouth sealed firmly shut. Their tongue is a traitor, and they'll bite it off, they think, vicious, if it tries to speak for them again. They'll bite it off and they'll swallow it _whole,_ if it doesn't get its business together, and then _no one_ will be using it at all.

There's that tickle at the back of their throat again, the cousin of a sneeze, and they don’t open their mouth. They bite down instead, jaw clamped so hard that it gives them spots in their eyes. It’s a force of effort! Every part of their body wants to relax: every breath feels like it’s the tug of their mothers’ brush through their hair, and they could just close their eyes and lean into it.

Lavi curls their hands tight, tight enough that their nails cut into their flesh, and they don’t open their mouth.

Someone else does.

“The child spoke our name,” Jocasta’s husband says, crisp, _mocking,_ “and yet they balk at our speech?”

When Lavi looks down, the sleepers are standing in front of the roof. Their eyes are closed, but their faces are upturned - and the pair of them are both staring, unmistakably, right at Lavi.

It strikes them, suddenly, maybe they don’t want to be a protagonist after all.

* * *

##  **APR 4TH, 2███**

The thing about sign is that it somehow feels a little more _real_ to talk about the daimons like this.

Out loud, the Voices are actions. Laugh-Last - Dance-for-Us - Seed-the-Grudge: quietly, Lavi thinks they're all _demands_ , orders that they're waiting for the club members to fulfill. Each time that Kyle taps his foot, or Xaviul smiles a little too wide, Lavi can almost see the puppet strings on their shoulders, pulling and tugging them to meet the satisfaction of some invisible force. It’s ominous, sure.

It’s a little absurd, too. The acronyms are better. Lavi just can’t bring themself to be really afraid of someone called _Thee-I-Dare._ And said aloud - well, Speak-as-One isn’t exactly _better._

But the gestures of sign language are just removed enough that they _feel_ more solemn.

 _(Astro looks to the left. They point to the empty space._ They - _)_

There’s a heaviness that comes with the physicality of it, Lavi thinks, that brings the words home to them, in a way that speech alone can’t quite manage.

 _(They draw the side of their hand to their mouth, their fingers fanned, out from it. One tap, then two. They, who Speak_ \- _)_

It’s like the names were made for _this,_ rather than to be spoken allowed.

_(And Astro’s placing their fists against each other, the thumbs out as they pull the gesture into a circle.)_

_The man who dares you. The woman who dances for us. They, who speak as one._ It’s not just a name: it’s an _action,_ something that people have done in the past, and will do immeasurable times in the future.

But maybe they _were_ made to be spoken, because saying a daimon’s name aloud draws their attention.

Saying their name like _this -_ in gestures, in acronyms - doesn’t.

At least, that’s what Astro says.

"They who speak as one," Astro mouths, and then smiles at them, slow and warm. "I've never heard them speak to me, no. Why are you asking?"

"They spoke to me," Lavi says, kicking their heels out. They're not in the boxcar. A lot of the kids prefer to talk there, but Astro's house is safe, one of the safest places to discuss things in Redacre. One of their mothers is deaf. The other one works the night shift, and left for work an hour ago, with a brief kiss to their head and a fond hand across Lavi's. "Don't tell anyone, or I'll _cry_ if you tell anyone, and I'll blame it _all_ on you."

Astro laughs. "I won't tell," they say, but then they sober up. Their kitchen is big, much bigger than Lavi's, and it's full of soft blue and browns, from the walls to the marble on the counters to the gleaming wood of the floor. It suits them. Astro's big, too, over a head taller than Lavi, and twice the width, with a smile as soft as the rug under their feet.

"Are you okay?"

"Of course I'm okay," Lavi lies, and kicks them in the knee, not hard enough to really hurt. Not that they could ever kick that hard, they think: Astro’s big, big as Lavi's father, and twice as wide. Lavi’s younger than most of the clubhouse, but they never really remember until they’re next to _Astro._ "They can't scare me! But they _tried._ I think they -”

Lavi pauses, chewing on their lip. “They wanted me to think they’d hurt me,” they say, slow. “But they can’t, can they? They’re like.. our parents. They just wanted to _scare_ me.” A beat. “Not that _my_ parents would try to scare me like that. They’re not _horrible.”_

"They claim they want unity," Astro says, reaching out to grab a chip. One of their mothers had left out a tray of food and snacks, and Lavi’s resentfully envious. _Their_ parents always just feed Lavi and their siblings the things they like: samosas and latkes and boxes of biscuits labelled in languages that Lavi can only just barely read, and that all manage to taste like shit.

But Astro gets _Lays,_ and a bag of chips that, intriguingly, says it’s Dewitoes. They’re green. Lavi keeps sneaking glances at them, but they haven’t quite worked up the courage to try one yet. "But I don't think that's true,” Astro says with their free hand. “I think they just want to control us.”

“How’s that any _different?”_ Lavi asks, toying with the edge of the tablecloth. They could just eat the regular chips. It’s not as if _Astro_ cares. But what if their mother never buys them again?

“Unity and control?” Astro looks at them for a long moment, their eyebrows furrowing, and Lavi can see that if they don’t correct them, Astro’ll be off on a different track entirely. Maybe they’ll even define the _words._ Marie does that, sometimes, like Lavi’s dumb, but their vocabulary’s good. They know what _unity_ means.

And what _control_ does, too. “If someone’s forcing everyone to agree,” Lavi says, finally ripping their attention off of the chips, “then that’s still unity. Everyone might not _like_ it. But it’s like..” They bite their lip, considering. “It’s like wolves! They’re in packs, right? And the biggest, alpha-iest of the wolves tells the rest what to do, and they fall in line. They might not be happy about it, but it’s still unity. They’re still all _agreeing.”_

“Wolves don’t have alphas,” Astro says slowly, and Lavi rolls their eyes.

“You get what I mean! Dogs, then!”

“Dogs don’t have alphas,” Astro says again, and Lavi kicks them under the table. “But I understand what you’re _saying._ I guess that’s unity. But it’s not a healthy kind. It’s not the sort of unity anyone _wants._ People chafe against that. And eventually, they’ll leave, and the unity just breaks.”

It’s a good point. Astro’s _always_ got good points. Because that’s what’s happening right now. Before the other daimons, Lavi keeps trying to think that the town was unified. But it hadn’t been, not really. Kids had started waking up in strange places, and talking to strange things, even before Bells had begun hearing Thee-I-Dare in her head. They’d been pushing back against the quarantine, and their parents, and the list of obligations, and orders, and _demands_ that stretched like strings on their back, all the way back to CHORUS itself.

If there’d been no voices, or sleepwalking..

Well. Maybe this would’ve happened _anyway,_ and they’d all just be worried about coyote bites, and not _mind control._

“They’re like a daimon of control, not unity. Or.. fascism, I guess you could say. I think of it as.." Astro slows, but it's fine. A silence with Xaviul means that he's loading back up his quiver, and it's just a matter of time before he shoots. Lavi always gets antsy over _that_ kind of silence, because the longer they give him to think, the more vicious the blow will be. But Astro doesn't play the same sorts of games that Lavi and Xaviul do.

Astro's just thinking, and if Lavi's patient, they'll say something that's worth the wait.

"I think of it as David and Goliath," Astro finally says. "We - the club members - we're like King David. SAO and CHORUS.. they're Goliath. We're not supposed to challenge them. No one thinks we're going to win. But we step up, because if we don't - who will? Everyone else's too scared."

"I'd like to be David." Lavi finally reaches out and takes a Dewito, carefully, between two fingers. The powder's green. It feels like sand. "He was pretty cool. Did you know he had, like, at least twenty three kids? And he, like, totally killed someone to steal his _wife?_ Dude needed a _hobby."_

"It sounds like he had hobbies, but not very good ones," Astro says, dry. They were reaching for another handful of chips, but they've stopped instead to watch Lavi and the dewito with great interest. It feels a little bit too much like pressure. "Are you going to eat that?"

If Astro hadn't been watching, Lavi thinks, they'd just have thrown the chip back into the bag. This close, the chip isn't just green: it's practically radioactive in colour, each granule of flavour dust sitting like neon on top of a molded piece of bread. There's nothing about it that looks appetising. They're regretting even grabbing it, honestly.

But Astro's watching, and they're not going to look like a coward. So carefully, meticulously, they lean forward, and they bite off the end of the chip. The texture still feels like sand in their mouth.

Unfortunately, the chip doesn't taste much better.

"I'm done," they declare, dropping it back onto the plate. "If we're David, and they're Goliath, does that mean you think we'll win?"

“I think we need to try.” Carefully, Astro removes the bitten chip from the plate, and sweeps all of the chips that’d touched it into their hand. Their chair squeaks as they stand up, and carefully, but firmly, dump the entire handful into the trash. “The Phillistines wanted to conquer the Israelites. David fought Goliath, and he won the kingdom its freedom. If he hadn’t, then yeah, there would have been unity. But people would have _died_ for it. And it wouldn’t be true unity.”

“It wouldn’t exist because people agreed,” Astro says. “It’d exist because someone bigger came along, and killed everyone that they couldn’t control.” They pause. “I don’t think SAO is going to kill us. I know Dax thinks that Bells is dead, but.. putting us to sleep, taking away our freedom.. that isn’t much better, is it?”

Lavi shrugs.

Astro’s always got such firm opinions. But Lavi’s never quite sure they’re the right ones to _have._ “Everyone wants to stay alive,” they say, trying out the words. “I don’t think.. it can’t just be, like, either you _die,_ or else you’re controlled, dude. We weren’t controlled _before_ all of this! We could do whatever we wanted.”

“We could do whatever CHORUS wanted,” Astro corrects them, and Lavi has to pause at that, because.. Astro’s not _wrong._

But it doesn’t feel quite right, either.

"My parents got married early. And my mum - her aunts had arranged marriages, but her parents didn't. And they came to Redacre. They were one of the first to come here." Lavi's oozing down in their seat, slow. The wooden boards on the back of the chair are digging into their back, their shoulders, their collar, slowing their process - but not stalling it. "And my mum never had to worry about it at all! She married my dad, and my dad isn't even - he's not Telugu, he's black. She would've married Aniruddh Madi, if her parents had their way, because at least he's _Hindu_. But they didn't try to control her."

"They could've," Lavi says, chewing on their lip. There’s a core of truth to Astro’s words, but they don’t think it’s quite _their_ truth, no matter how many times they turn it around in their head. "If they'd pushed, I bet my mum would’ve folded, because my mum thinks they're the _bees knees,_ even if they watch soaps. If SAO wanted to control us, then, like - why would they’ve started _now?_ ”

“My mum’s family - my _dad’s_ family - they’ve been here forever, and ever, and ever. They could’ve just.. controlled _everything,_ right from the go, and never had my dad be born at all. Or _me.”_

Astro pauses, thinking. And then they say, with a flick of their hands: "Do you think your grandparents serve -"

Lavi could just ooze under the table, and to the ground, and away from this entire conversation! But Astro signs, and that means Lavi actually has to _look_ at them. Lavi scoots up, and instead of sliding down, just slips forward on the table in a boneless pile of elbows and hair. They do so much in the name of friendship, they think, petulant. They deserve a _prize._

"Maybe,” Lavi hedges, and then: "- don't all of our parents? Doesn't _everyone_?"

"I think they want everyone to _think_ that.” Astro smiles, wry, but it doesn’t reach their eyes. “Because if every adult does.. then we've got no one we can trust, do we? They get to isolate us. We’re not King David, with all of Israel at our backs. We’re just David, the shepherd, with the whole town against us.”

“But David stood alone, and he still won,” Lavi says, and kicks them under the table. “And we don’t have to worry about _that._ We’re never alone. We’ve always got each other.”

* * *

##  **APRIL 21ST, 2███**

When Xaviul had told them about the Voices, he’d phrased it as entities. “There’s some weird _creatures_ wandering the town,” he’d told them, voice hushed as he’d kept an eye on the rest of the schoolyard. “When you close your eyes, they’ll talk to you. And when you sleep.. they’ll take control of you.”

When Lavi’s parents tell them, hours after their bat mitzvah, they call them _gods._

"So what you're saying," Lavi says, their voice brittle-bright, "is that we're, like.. in a cult?”

They still have on their shoes from the bat mitzvah. They’re little heels, the sort that click, and it’s taking all of their concentration to hold still. Their mother _hates_ when they fidget, so they smooth a hand over their dress instead, pushing out the wrinkles. It’s all silk and lace, something that their _ammamma_ made for them.

Everyone had complimented them on it, at the party. It’s all red and white, and everyone had agreed that was their colour, even though Lavi had asked for blue.

"Of course it's not a cult,” their father says, his mouth twisting into something that’s almost but not quite a smile. If their mother wasn’t here, they think, he’d be smiling. The skin under his eyes is _bunched,_ like he’d like to be smiling. “Do I seem like the cult type, sweetheart? I run a _theater_ . And your mother is a _professor.”_

“It sounds like a cult,” Lavi says. They force a corner of their mouth, scrunch up their nose in the way that makes it look like they think this’s funny. _We haven’t been telling you the whole truth,_ their father had said, when they’d first sat down, and - if they hadn’t heard it from Xaviul and Marie first, if they hadn’t sat in the traincar and listened to the other children, they think they’d find it funny!

If they hadn’t heard a god speaking in their head, they’d be _laughing._

So they laugh now, smoothing a hand down their skirt -

“Stop fidgeting,” their mother says, bored, and they stop.

“Aren’t we _Jewish?”_ They want to curl their fingers into the soft cloth of their skirt, or their hair, or their _skin._ They want to tap their foot, or shift in their seat, or drum their nails against the table -

They bite their lip instead. “Because, like,” they say, warm, like this’s all a _joke,_ “I thought we just had an entire, like, party about that?”

Lavi’s parents can’t read them well. No one can, honestly, except sometimes, maybe Xaviul. There’s something magical about all the tiny squashes and pulls of their face: if they wrinkle their nose, if they smile so that it _scrunches,_ nobody ever pays much attention to anything else. Because their voice’s so sticky sweet that it makes the back of their throat burn, but their father just gives in, smiles at them like they’ve said something delightful, and he can’t see the way they’re trying not to clench their teeth.

They wish they could smooth out their skirt.

"We’re still Jewish. Think less of God," he says, gentle, "and more of Godliness. Think of the benediction over bread, dear. Do you remember what that is?"

Of course they remember, Lavi wants to say, but their mother's right there, watching them with hawkish eyes. Their father thinks it’s funny when they talk back! He always thinks everything they do is funny, like they’re a joke someone’s tailored just for _him,_ but their mother’s never had any time for humour.

So they say, instead: "Blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the Earth."

And their father smiles at them, soft. "Good job. And who are we praising?"

"God," they say.

"Good job," he says, like it was some great task, and it's so hard to bite back the venom that wants to bubble up! It's so _hard,_ when they _hate_ that he won’t ever take them seriously. They’re thirteen: practically an adult, practically old enough to move out, and live on their own, and do whatever they want, but no one ever treats them like that.

They’re not a joke tailored to their father’s humour. They feel like a _dog,_ sometimes, instead: one of the small, fluffy sorts, the ones that everyone laughs at, and think are too useless to even walk on their own.

They’re so tempted to just say that. But they hold the venom back, and roll it away with the lump of their throat and the frantic thrum of their heart, still pushing against their teeth. Getting upset at their father never works out in their favour. All it’s ever done is make him _laugh._

"But although we praise God, what of Adam's work? He's the one that took what the earth provided him, and he plowed, he sowed, he reaped.."

Their father's voice is soft and mild. It's the sort of tone he's always used to calm their mother down, when her temper flares, and it's the tone he always uses when he's teaching, something so mild that no one could ever take offense. Lavi hates it. They hate it all the more for the fact it's working to soothe down their outrage. Their father never takes them seriously, but that’s fine, isn’t it?

It’s not like anyone else does, either.

"There's a divinity within one's actions, sweetheart,” he continues. “To enrich, to repair - those are acts of godliness, and our prayers, our appreciation, our petitions.. those all include those acts."

"We aren't worshipping Speak-as-One, to the detriment of God. It's got nothing to do with God, really." He leans forward on his desk, long fingers splayed out across it. "To speak as one is not a name, but it is an order: it is something we do to enrich humanity, and repair our connections within it. Because unfortunately, sweetheart.. our people are fractured." They open their mouth, and he holds up one long finger to silence them. Lavi’s fingers knot in their skirt, hard enough that it hurts. "Not just Jewish people," he says, gentle, "but all of us. Every human out there. Once, we were one. And now.."

"We're divided," Lavi's mother says, brisk. "And we're letting those divisions ruin us. Think of your ammamma. Her family disowned her when she married your thataguru - not because he was cruel, or because he was too old, or too young, or anything rational.. but because he was the wrong caste. A manmade division, created solely to separate us."

"But it doesn't have to be that way," her father says, picking up so smoothly that it's as if he'd never stopped. "We weren't like this, once. And when I say that we worship Speak-as-One.. every good act is an act of godliness, and an act of worship.”

“And our species is broken. Is there any better act out there, than trying to fix it?"

  
  


* * *

## MAY 1ST, 2███

A voice is -

“A form of consciousness,” Lavi tries, chewing on their pen. “It’s a natural result of, like, um. cognizance, I think, right? We think, and so we are. Birds talk in the shell. Like, swallows will start copying their parents songs before they even _hatch._ I read it in Discover.”

Josh is, technically speaking, supposed to be their maths tutor. But Lavi doesn’t think they super need one: the problem isn’t that they’re bad at maths, it’s that the classes are so _boring,_ but nobody ever believes them, except Josh. Josh always believes them, and he’s always saying that they’d be one of the most clever kids in the school, if only they could just focus. They don’t need to work on _maths,_ he always says: they need to just work on their focus, so they can stay on one track.

That’s why they’ve been studying daimons, instead. The topic’s so strange, it’s a little enthralling to Lavi: they don’t get bored, or distracted, or tired at all, when they’re digging into _this._ Everything’s new, and everything _conflicts,_ and it’s all the more interesting for that, because every time Lavi thinks they’ve figured something out, they discover something that says the exact opposite. They can work on it for hours, and hours, and hours, and every time that Josh’s asked for an update, they’ve had hours of research to explore with him.

Technically, their parents had told them that they couldn’t tell the other kids, but it’s fine. They’d told Astro, first off, because they’d _had_ to: they told Astro almost everything in their life. Then they’d told Xaviul, just because _he’d_ told them about daimons in the first place, and only then had they told Josh, because it’d been so much more worthwhile to study than _maths._

Honestly, Lavi thinks, it was basically like they hadn’t really told anyone at all.

And it’s not like the entire _town_ doesn’t know already. Xaviul took them to the boxcar all the way at the start of February, back when the Madi-Shaw girl had first disappeared and Tommy had first drawn him into the club. There’d only been a few people there, few enough that Lavi could’ve counted them on their fingers. But it feels like there’s new faces every night, now, as the months go by. More and more kids are blacking out, and more and more of them are ending up in front of the boxcar, one way or another.

If they hadn’t told Josh, they reason, someone else would’ve.

“I don’t know,” he says now, slow. “I mean, yeah, that’s true, but I don’t think we’re like birds. No one’s talking in the _womb._ ”

“That’s because we’re not fully cooked. Ravi and Lakshmi were, like, _potatoes,_ until six months, and _then_ they started babbling all the time. It’s _totes_ linked to cognition. D’you think a coma patient could have a Voice talk to ‘em?” They pause. Josh’s eyes widen.

“Dreaming is like being _in_ a coma,” they say - he says - and then he laughs, wry.

“Okay! Okay, maybe you’re onto something here. A voice is a form of consciousness. You can’t talk, unless you can think. You can’t think, unless you have words to put it in. Dolphins have huge vocabularies. So do parrots.” Josh leans back in his chair, tapping his pencil against his mouth. They’re settled in his backyard, and Lavi likes his a lot better than theirs: he actually lives out in the _country,_ far enough on the outskirts of Redacre that his parents own acres and acres of land. When they’re at the firepit, Lavi’s mathbooks spread out across the ground in front of them and the house half-hidden behind the bushes, it feels like they’re out in the wilderness, talking about things that no one’s ever discussed before.

Maybe they are! Lavi’s not sure they trust the kids at the boxcar, not quite yet, and none of them want to dig into what’s going on the way that they do, even though they should. Gwenna’d said they don’t have enough answers, yet, when Lavi had asked where she thought the daimons had come from. But how could they get answers, if no one was even trying to find them?

If the daimons were real, Lavi thinks, then it’d be easy. In class, they’d dissected frogs, and squids, and cow eyes, with their soft, lovely eyelashes still fanned across the lid. They’d taken them apart, piece by piece, and Lavi’s teacher had explained each bit, what it did, and how it’d worked. By the end of it, Lavi’d felt as if they could have built a frog, if they’d wanted.

If the daimons were real, Lavi thinks, they’d just pin Speak-as-One to a board, and slice them open from mouth to mouth, and mark up each and every part.

They _wish_ they were real. It’d be easier than all of this.

“So they talk to us in dreams,” Lavi says, slow. “And they talk to us in _voices,_ right? They could do something else. When God spoke to Abraham, they came as a flaming bush. It wasn’t.. letters that you could read. It wasn’t a voice you could _hear._ So why do they do that?”

“Maybe it’s easier.” Josh shrugs. “Maybe it’s less scary,” he says, wry. “I mean, I don’t know about you, Lav, but if I saw a flaming bush, I wouldn’t take advice from it. I’d just _leave.”_

Lavi thinks of citrus orange letters, burning across their eyes. “I don’t think they’re trying _not_ to scare us. I think -” _They want to control us,_ Astro had signed with a half-smile. _But I don’t plan on being controlled._ “I think - they just -”

 _Our species is broken,_ their father had said.

“- I think they just want what’s best for us, but they’re not very _good_ at it, are they?”

“I don’t know,” Josh says. “You’re the expert, aren’t you?”

Josh’s just watching them, waiting, the same way he does when their attention drifts too far off of maths, or their pencil marks start to skitter. They’ll get back on track eventually, he knows, and they know: there’s just a whole muddle of words in their brain, ideas jostling each other like their siblings in the kitchen, and they just need to figure out which ones they want to drag to the forefront.

It doesn’t take as long as it does, sometimes, right now. He said they’re the expert. They’ve never been called an expert on anything before.

People don’t take Lavi _seriously._

“They’re not very good at it,” Lavi say, more decisive, firming up with every word. Because this makes _sense,_ and more the longer they go on. “They’re a - a _form of consciousness,_ right? But they’re like dolphins, or gophers, or - or _parrots._ Or chimps! You can put them in a diaper, and you can pretend they’re a person, and they might think they’re a person, and they might _talk_ like a person, but in the end, they’re _not.”_

“They’re something else,” they say, and then they laugh, biting their lip. “Right?”

“I don’t know, “Josh says. “You’re the one that’s talked to them, right? You spoke to Speak -”

“You can’t say their _name!”_ Lavi cries, bolting out of their chair. Their books scatter, their foot landing right in the middle of their homework, but they don’t care. Their heart’s in their mouth, so heavy and large that they almost can’t breathe around it. Their eyes hurt, suddenly, like the memory of the letters alone is enough to make them ache. “You can’t! They’ll _hear you!”_

“Whoa -” Josh holds up his hands, appeasing. “I’m sorry,” he says, his lip quirking up at the corner, “I won’t say it! But - I mean - why are you so _scared?_ What d’you think’ll happen, if they hear me?”

They don’t _know._ But they can’t say that, not when he’s looking at them like they’re being foolish, or like he might think they’re not the expert at all.

“They’ll kill you,” they say instead, with all the confidence they can manage. It’s a lie! It’s a lie, but - maybe it’s not, is it? Everyone’s scared of Speak-as-One. They’ve never found anyone dead, they’ve never seen them _hurt_ anyone, but Lavi remembers the marks on Marie’s legs, and the purple ringing Tommy’s neck. They know it happens. And Bells had disappeared - SAO had taken her away - and she’d never come back.“Or they’ll hurt you. They’re not very _nice.”_

“You said they want to help us,” Josh says, dubious, and they can almost see their credibility circling the drain with every word. Maybe in a moment, he’d give up on believing them at all. Maybe he’d dismiss all of this as a lie, something that’d Lavi had just _made up_ to impress him.

They don’t want that. The kids in the clubhouse treat them like a _kid._ Xaviul’s fifteen, and Gwenna and Dax, they’re both _old,_ old enough that Dax has a license, and Gwenna has her own _car._ Marie’s going to graduate in a year or two. Astro’s already started talking about college. Lavi’s the youngest in the club at thirteen, but for all the respect they get, they might as well be _four._

Their parents don’t respect them. The club doesn’t respect them.

But Josh isn’t a part of the club. They’re the only person he knows right now, and they’re the only source of information he has. He respects them, because right now, as far as he knows, they’re the only authority in the whole town on the topic of daimons. He respects them, because he thinks he _has_ to.

They just need to act like they think that, too.

“They want to help us,” they repeat, “but - like - it’s like a _dog_ wants you to help you, when it sees you swimming?” The idea’s forming even as they speak, but they force themself to sound confident, because if they so much as falter, Josh’ll lose all faith in them. And they don’t think they could stand it, if he looked at them the way that everyone _else_ does, like they’re something small and fluffy and _stupid._ “It thinks you’re drowning! So it gets in the water with you, and it starts trying to tug you out, but - it doesn’t _realise,_ like, you’re not drowning at all! You’re just _fine._ But you can’t tell it that.”

“It just gets more, and more frustrated the longer you’re in the water, and the more.. scared. So maybe it’ll bark at you. Or maybe it’ll, like, bite you, trying to get you out of the water! But it’s not trying to, right? It’s trying to help.”

“It can’t help the fact it’s just a big, dumb _dog._ Maybe -” Oh, they _faltered._ But they can still save it, so they pause and smile, like it was on purpose. “ _Maybe,”_ they say, twisting it into a joke, “ _maybe_ they’re just, like, really, really bad at it?”

“Bad enough that they’ll kill you, if you say their name,” Josh says with a laugh, and..

Lavi sucks on their teeth, taking a step back. They press their hands to their mouth, as their brain twists in on itself, circle after circle after _circle._ They’re losing him! They’re losing him, and he’s going to talk to someone else, if they can’t figure out how to win back his confidence, and then he’ll never say they’re an expert on this at all. Josh is their tutor, but he won’t waste his time figuring out daimons with them during their sessions, if he can do it with Xaviul or Dax instead.

They’re older. They’re _smarter,_ probably, because they’d never fumble it like this, and if Josh starts talking to the other club kids -

Everyone thinks of them as a _kid._

If Josh starts talking to the club, he will, too.

“They’ll kill _you,”_ they say, finally, and they don’t know what they’re saying. They don’t know what they’re _doing,_ exactly, as they turn towards the firepit, and climb carefully on top of it. There’s just enough room along the rim to pace in a circle, long, precise steps that they can focus on, instead of the words coming out of their mouth. “Because they don’t know you! And they’re _scared,_ and so -”

 _They want to be in control,_ Astro said.

“So they’ll be mean to _you._ But -” This is such a terrible idea. But they want to be in control, too. “But they’ll listen to _me,”_ Lavi says, lifting their chin, so bright that the lie ought to burn coming out of their mouth. “They know _me.”_

“They _like_ me. We just have to train them! Like our parents. But don’t worry.”

Josh leans forward. “Lavi,” he says, slowly. There’s no doubt in his voice. There’s only fear, and Lavi’s heart skips a beat at the sight of it, twists into something that’s either exhilaration or pride or terror. “Lavi, what’re you -”

They grin at him, all teeth.

“I’m _great_ at that. Speak-as-One,” they say, loud as a bell, and Josh flinches.

“Speak-as-One!”

Their heart is racing in their chest, but they keep walking, one foot after another, with a confidence they don’t feel. It doesn’t matter. No one will ever feel what they feel, when it comes down to it. All that anyone can see is what they let them see, and Lavi’s always been good for performances.

“ _Speak-as-One!_ ” they call out, chin held high, and then: “- we have a question for you!”

Once, when Lavi was younger, they’d watched a cat kill a bird. They hadn’t thought much of it at the time. The cat had needed to eat, they figured, and they’d never given it much thought past that, but right now, they feel as if the bird must have, in those last moments: like there’s an unbearable weight on their chest, and fangs brushing at their throat, and they’re just waiting for them to close.

The bird had stopped fighting, at the end. It’d just laid there and waited for the fangs, but Lavi’s never believed in waiting for anything. Their breath is caught in their throat, but they force themself to swallow around the weight of it. “Speak-as-One,” they say again, quieter, but firmer. “Speak-as-One! We have a _fucking question -”_

Behind them, Joshua says: “- oh _fuck.”_

They close their eyes.

It doesn’t hurt less than the last time.

It’s like looking into the Sun through closed eyes. It’s not just light: it’s _heat,_ like the letters are burning their way into their very soul. Lavi didn’t quite believe in souls, before all of this, but now.. there’s bile at the back of their throat, and the too-crisp smell of ozone in their nose. The pain isn’t a physical sensation, not quite, and there’s no sunspots when they peel their eyes open, hands clasping to their mouth even as their lips reflexively part.

There’s no sunspots, but they can still see the words, burned like an afterimage into their vision:

**HELLO, CHILDREN.**

* * *

  
  


## MAY 15TH, 2███

Lavi has chased down every child in the boxcar, over the last few months, and they’ve ripped every piece of information that they can from them. A lot of it’s been garbage. A lot of it’s taken so much _work,_ for what ultimately amounts to trash. No one wants to tell them anything too dark, too deep, too secretive, not at first. They’re still the youngest kid in the Blackout Club by a healthy margin, and everyone treats them like it.

They’re too small, too delicate, too _young._ Lavi doesn’t see why anyone would think they could ever be told anything more traumatising than what they’ve seen, already, but.. it’s fine. They’re used to being underestimated. And if people think that they’re soft, and young, and _delicate,_ then that’s fine, too, because they know how to work with it.

Everyone lets their guard down, around Lavi. It just takes time, and patience, and the right words, because if the older kids think that they’re starting to lean on Lavi, they’ll clam up. But when Lavi cries, or says they’re _worried,_ or acts like they need to lean on the _older_ kids..

The past few months have been a lot. Everyone wants to talk to someone, and Lavi’s squirmed their way, tear by tear, into being that person.

It’s just a shame that most of it’s _garbage._

“Thee-I-Dare,” they call out. He hasn’t come any time before this, but that’s fine. If you say a daimon’s name out loud, they’ll hear you. It’s one of the few consistencies that everyone can agree with, no matter the kid, no matter which god that they’ve spoken to. And haven’t they proven that with Speak-as-One?

“Thee-I-Dare! You made the club. And you saved us. So, um, I guess we should say thanks for that. Everyone says that was nice of you..”

“But -” They’re pacing along the edge of a wall in Hoadley’s woods, arms outstretched as they walk, chewing steadily at a piece of gum that lost its flavour around an hour or so ago. It’s off the path, in a part of the walking trails that no one ever goes, but it’s close enough that Lavi’s not worried about getting lost. It’s as close to privacy as they can get, honestly, out in Redacre. “I think they’re wrong. Because was it because you were being nice, or was it because, like, you wanted to use us?”

“Because you keep asking kids - sleep or death. And personally..”

Their bubble, when they blow it, is the saddest specimen they’ve ever managed. It deflates even as they’re blowing it, and there’s no satisfying _pop_ when they bite it in half: it’s just like biting the head off of a gummy bear, bland and dissatisfying. “They’re being _edgelords,”_ Lavi decides. “All the ones that say death. And you can’t be nice, if you’re encouraging that. That’s, like - that’s _suicide,_ dude, that’s not cool at all.”

“If you’re asleep, you’ll wake up, eventually. We woke up once, right?” Lavi’s heard a lot of creation stories throughout their life - from their father, from their grandmother, from Xaviul and from class. Listening to their grandmother tell it, Hinduism had over a dozen different ones, all of which served a different purpose, and their father hadn’t proven much more concrete. They’d been apes, once, a long time ago, and then they’d been something that wasn’t quite human, and then that’d become _them._

“Tommy said you did that,” they say aloud. “I mean - um - the waking up bit. You’re the reason we’re not - neanderthals, or whatever, and we’re what we are _now._ But I don’t think that’s right, either, if we’re being honest! I don’t think - it’s evolution. Parrots can talk. Dolphins can talk. Even _chimps_ can talk, if you teach ‘em. If it’s a metaphor -”

They spit out their gum with a grimace, and twine a hand through their hair. “If it’s a metaphor,” they say, firm, “then it’s a _bad_ one. We always would’ve woken up. I don’t think it had anything to do with you. I think you’re just taking _credit,_ because.. that’s what you things do, right? If you don’t take credit, you won’t _grow.”_

“You’re like a scapegoat. You burrow into our cells, and when we do things, we say it’s because of _you._ Because it’s easier that way then just admitting it would’ve happened anyway.”

“It’s easier than admitting we don’t have control over anything at _all.”_

There’s no answer. There never is an answer, when they’re talking to Thee-I-Dare, but that’s alright. Lavi doesn’t think they need one. Not from him.

There’s a daimon that might actually answer their questions, even if they won’t like the answers.

“Speak-as-One,” they say now. There’s always that electric moment, when they start talking, where they think something might happen. It’s been six weeks, give or take, since it’d spoken to them and Josh. Ever since, when their breath catches, or their eyes itch like a lash’s caught in them, they catch themselves wondering -

But it never is.

That’s fine. “Hi,” they call out. Sweet! They have to sound sweet, like they’re talking to one of the older kids. Because their parents won’t answer their questions, not in the way they want them to. Their father’s shared bits and pieces of Speak-as-One, pieces they’ve taken back immediately to Josh, and they’ve been interesting, but..

Lavi’s heard the spiel. Speak-as-One is unity. Speak-as-One is salvation. To speak as one is an order, not a request: it is to embrace your ancestors, to follow your people, and to embrace the betterment of unity. Speak-as-One has been a principle since the start of humanity, but as humanity grew, it shifted from its roots.

It lost its reverence for the past, and became obsessed with the future. And in doing so, humanity had accepted so many more burdens than it was ever intended to bear.

It’s mostly a lie, Lavi knows. Their parents had tried to convince them that Santa Claus was real, when they were very young, and it’d been the first time they’d realised that their parents would lie to them.. but it hadn’t been the first. They could have been angry about it, the way that some of the kids are, but..

Everyone lies, from parents to children to daimons. Lavi’s lying right now, their chin held up high, their words so much more _boisterous_ than the frantic pulse of their heart feels.

But every lie has a core of truth in it, somewhere. Speak-as-One isn’t everything, the way their parents claim. But maybe it was, once.

“My parents worship you,” they say, spinning on the wall. Two steps forward, one step back: it doesn’t make the pacing more interesting, exactly, but it gives them something a little more interesting to do. “My grandparents do, too, apparently. And my aunts, and my uncles, and my cousins -”

“Well. Not all of them,” they allow. “The dead ones don’t, I guess.”

“But - if everyone I know worships you - doesn’t that mean I should? Because my dad said.. he said that you’re not just a daimon. He said that you’re all of _us._ Everyone that’s died, in the past. Everyone that’s alive, right now. Humanity, all the way back to the neanderthals.”

“So maybe I will! Maybe I’ll throw my hat in here. Because.. you want to keep everyone alive, don’t you? You’re our parents. And our aunts, and our uncles, and our grandparents, and _everyone._ So you don’t really _want_ to hurt us.” They told Josh this. They’re not sure, still, they believe it, not when they’ve seen the mottled marks around Marie’s neck.

But it doesn’t matter if they believe it. If they feel doubt, then Speak-as-One will feel it - so they’ll just have to decide they _don’t._

“You just want the others gone. And I think we _all_ want that. We were doing pretty great, before they came. No one was sleepwalking,” they say, and pause on the wall, tipping forward. Gingerly, they place one hand on the stone, gently applying pressure, and then the next. Walking on their hands is hard! But it’s something to pay attention to, instead of the rapid thunk of their heart.

The daimons feel what you feel, everyone agrees. They think what you think. The key to selling a lie, with a daimon, with a person, is always the same: you never leave the option of not buying it on the table. So they focus on the rough stone cutting into their palms, instead, and on the blood rushing to their head, and on everything, except for their words.

“No one was _dying,_ like Bells. Because she’s totes dead. Thee-I-Dare got her _killed,_ and he’s trying to get the rest of us killed, and the other Voices.. it doesn’t matter if we die, as far as they’re concerned, does it? We can’t even _host_ them, yet. We’re not old enough.”

“We’re just - cattle being raised, and if they can steal us when we’re ready, that’s great, but if the herd gets thinned.. there’s other towns, out there. There’s other _kids._ We’re not special to anyone, except for our parents.”

“And you. Right?”

“So I could worship you. I could sacrifice! That’s what you want, right? That’s what you’re all after? Us to give you our _bodies._ Us to give you your time.”

“Do I have to bite my thumb?” they jeer. “Cut open my palm, sacrifice a goat, murder a _brother?_ Is this, like - or - should I, like, build the high places, and turn this into an alien place, and - and -" They laugh, biting their lip, and it's hard not to tip. "- pass myself through the fires to Molech? 'cause, like, gotta say, I don't super like that idea. Maybe I can just say it! I could say that I, Lavanya Anat Vankamamidi-Goldfinch, sacrifice my time, or my blood, or _whatever_ , to you, Speak-as-One. Or -”

Their hand slips.

They swear, slamming down their free hand and catching themself just before they tip - but then they adjust, twisting a little too far to rebalance, and they just fall the _other_ way, right into the grass.

_Goddamnit._

There’s no answer from the daimons. There’s never an answer, not when they _want_ one, but -

Lavi bounces to their feet. Their cheeks are flaming, and their skin is hot and itchy, in a way that always makes them want to peel off someone else’s. “Or maybe I won’t,” they snap, scrubbing at their face. It’s sore. There’s _dirt_ on it. “Maybe I won’t worship you! What’ve you done to protect us? What’ve you _ever_ done for us, except - except get us into this mess, in the first place?”

“Bells is _dead_ somewhere, and maybe - maybe Thee-I-Dare pulled the trigger, but you let it _happen._ I bet you killed the preacher, too. I bet you made him leap right off the cliff.”

“I bet you’re going to make us,” they say, waspish, “if we don’t tow the line.” They plop down in the grass, leaning back against the wall. The cliff edge is only ten feet away. They looked up deaths, after Bells’ disappearance. They know how many people have died on Hoadley’s Leap.

It’s not just the leap. Redacre is full of cliffs, and their foundations are built on bones.

If they took a step forward, they wouldn't fall. Lavi's silly, but they're not stupid. They’d hit the rocks ten, fifteen down. They’d roll, if they didn’t hit a tree, and if they survived that, they wouldn’t survive the next.

They call it Hoadley’s Leap, but Lavi knows he didn’t leap. People said that he’d heard voices. Their classes had called it an illness of the mind, and Lavi had wondered, even then, if that was the truth of the matter. Now, they know it was a lie. Hoadley had come to the cliffs, looking to drive out the voices. He had stepped off the edge of them, and he had skidded, and he had bled, and it had all been for naught.

Lavi thinks that the voices probably spoke to him all the way until they didn’t. He gave his life, but had he ever had time to appreciate the silence?

They wish they could ever appreciate the silence! They just want to know everything, but it seems like nobody will tell them enough to know anything at all. With their parents, at least, they know how to pull some information out of them. With Speak-as-One -

How do you manipulate something that's older than time itself?

"You're the worst," they complain, and they're not sure if they're talking to themself, or Speak as One, or both.

* * *

  
  


## MAY 21TH, 2███

“June Littlefeather's daughter,” their mother says at the dinner table, patting her mouth gently with a napkin. She’s got one of her notebooks in front of her, the pages bristling with the coloured tabs she uses to keep track, and she’s been writing all throughout the silent meal. Parvathi Vankamamidi enjoys few things in life. One of them is her husband, but neither children nor small talk have ever, as far as Lavi can tell, been included on the list. “Do you know anything about her?”

Lavi doesn’t curse, but they’re sorely tempted.

They’ve been hunched over the table, their math homework spread out across the table in front of them. It’s not _hard,_ honestly. Maths are never hard, the way that their parents think they are: they’re just boring, boring, _boring,_ a hundred little rows of numbers that all mean the same thing and always come to the same end, and it’s hard to focus on them. Their pencil keeps drifting to the edges of the page instead, and Lavi’s only managed a few problems, but they’re managing a pretty grove of dogwoods, with owls hidden in the branches.

If they twisted things just right, they think, they could turn the numbers into owls, too, and _roots._ But that’d take concentration to keep them still looking like numbers, and it’s _hard_ to concentrate, when their mother breaks the silence, and their siblings take that as a sign that _everyone_ can now talk.

“Lavaaa,” Lakshmi warbles from her highchair. She slams her chubby fists into the tray, blowing out her cheeks. “Lavalavalavaaa!”

“Lavanya,” Ravi says, kicking them under the table. Their pencil jitters across the page, ruining the perfect arc of a branch and dragging right through an owl’s neck. “Pass me the sal?!” He doesn’t wait for a response. He’s already leaning halfway over the table, his elbow perilously close to their glass.

“ _Ravi!_ Stop it!” they yelp, shoving at him. His elbow’s too close to his glass, but when he pulls it in, it’s too close to their notebook. “Don’t smudge my _work_ \- no, don’t move that way - you’re going to tip my glass -”

“Don’t _shove me -”_

“Then don’t get near my _glass!_ Just _ask!_ ”

_“I did ask -”_

“ _Children,”_ their mother says, sharp as ice dropping into a glass, and then: “ _\- Lavanya.”_

Lavi sinks back into their chair, face flushing. It’s not _fair._ It’s not fair! Because she says Lavi’s name like _they’re_ the one misbehaving, and they haven’t done anything. They’ve barely done anything at _all._

“Ravi, take your sister to her room,” their mother continues, and Ravi deflates, his face warming up. Their mother doesn’t interact with them often, but it always feels like she’s scolding them when she does. “Lavanya. You may stay seated.”

May! Like it’s a _privilege._

“Am I in trouble?” they ask, kicking out their feet under the table. If they stretch out their toes, they can touch the chair where their father usually sits. He sits across from them, because he says it makes it easier to keep an eye on all three at once, but their mother always sits at the head of the table. It’s because she’s head of the household, but Lavi thinks it’s just because she doesn’t want to be near them, if she can help it.

They don’t know why she had children at _all,_ sometimes.

“Should you be in trouble?” their mother asks, not looking up from her notebook, and that’s one of those trick questions: Lavi could implicate themself, if they’re not careful. They’ve done that before, and slipped up and admitted something that’s won them more disapproval than they can bear. Their mother never asks questions that aren’t a _trap._

“ _No._ But you’re making me stay at the table.”

“Then you’re not,” she says, neatly ignoring the latter part entirely. The _skritch skritch_ of the pen on paper stills. Her mother licks her finger, turns the next page in her notebook, and Lavi closes their eyes.

But the skritch of the pen doesn’t resume, and when they open them, their mother’s watching them instead, tapping the end of her pen against her lips. She looks awkward, but then again, Lavi’s mother always looks awkward, or like she’s smelled something slightly sour.

“Don’t kick the chairs, Lavanya. Do you know June Littlefeather’s daughter?” she asks again.

“I don’t know who _June_ is,” Lavi complains, slouching in their chair. When their father’s home, they don’t all have to sit at the table. When their _father’s_ home, he lets them talk, sometimes, if he doesn’t have something more important to say. When their _father’s_ home, he leads the entire conversation around the room, like they’re trained dogs on a leash.

When their father’s home, they don’t have to deal with their mother’s questions at _all._ “Is that one of your coworkers?”

“No.” A beat. “Her daughter is in the year above you,” her mother says. “Tall. Five foot ten. Red hair.” Lavi thinks they’re great at reading people’s expressions, but their mother’s always been inscrutable. Her face just doesn’t _change!_ And she always sounds a little mean, but..

She sounds a little drier than usual, when she says: “- she lives in a trailer.”

“Oh, _her._ That’s Xaviul’s friend.” Lavi’s never been able to decide if they’re jealous that Xaviul has other friends. They’re friends, mostly, because their mothers know each other - they work for CHORUS, like most of the adults, but somehow, they work _closer._ Lavi’s never really asked. There’s few things that interest them about their mother, and none of them involve her _work._

Lavi’s father owns a theater, full of costumes, and makeup, and with a concession’s stand that always has enough sugar to make them have to nap afterwards. They’re only allowed to watch rehearsals on the night before the shows, but he lets them play in the dressing rooms, sometimes, if they put the clothing back neatly. Lavi likes their father’s work. It keeps him busy.

They’re not entirely sure what their mother does, except that it means she’s _always_ working, even on Saturday’s, even on _holidays._ It’s something too boring for even Xaviul’s mother to talk about, and she’s far chattier than Lavi’s has ever been.

“Is that so?” She’s just watching them, like they’re one of her research papers, but it’s fine. Lavi’s half under the table by now, slowly but steadily oozing to the ground, and part of them thinks: well, if they have to talk to her, it might be better if they’re just under the table for the conversation. They could do whatever they _wanted,_ under the table. 

“Proper posture at the table, Lavanya,” their mother says, and they want to scream.

They sit up instead, prim and proper, so stiff that their spine should snap from it. If it did, it’d serve her _right._ “I haven’t talked to her before,” Lavi whines, letting their voice go reedy. “She’s weird. And she doesn’t like people. She, like, talks to _Xavi,_ and if anyone else comes over, she _leaves._ D’you want Xavi’s number? ‘cause I can give it to you. I don’t know - I don’t know anything about her, but she probably just decided school’s terrible.”

“Doesn’t she live in the woods, or something?” Lavi asks. “Maybe she just decided she doesn’t _need_ school. She can go, like, hunt _deer_ or something, if she wants to.”

“Neptune’s son is very eloquent for his age. Is she intelligent, then?” their mother asks, licking a finger and gently turning the page of her book. She’s not looking up at Lavi anymore, and..

It should be a relief! Lavi doesn’t like the way that their mother stares at them. It feels too often like she’s trying to analyse them, but she’s so _terrible_ at it: for all that she raised them, she doesn’t understand them at all. Their father doesn’t understand them, either, but at least he doesn’t pay them enough attention to ever _try._

But it turns out that Lavi doesn’t like being ignored, either. “She’s a _fucking_ hick,” they say, watching their mother closely, and sure enough, she closes her eyes, ever so briefly, at the curse. Lavi’s never gotten in trouble for cursing, but they know their mother hates it. Finds it _undignified_ in children, even though Lavi learned it from her. “I said I don’t talk to her. But, like, probably _not.”_

“Don’t be so derisive, Lavanya.” A beat. “That means disrespectful,” she says, like Lavi wouldn’t know.

They didn’t. But they could have figured it _out._

“I’m just telling the truth,” Lavi says, but their mother’s talking right over them, as if she isn’t even paying attention. It’s _weird._ Their mother’s always big on respect: she doesn’t cut them off while they’re talking, even when she thinks it’s stupid, and she _always_ thinks it’s stupid. It’s their father that’ll cut off sentences, and plow right over without ever realising that anyone’s talking.

Their mother always lets them _speak._ But she’s so distracted by her own words, Lavi thinks, she might not have noticed them talking at all.

“Mrs. Neptune said she was smart enough. But she has her own biases.” Their mother pauses again, twisting her mouth to the side. “I have my own biases,” she admits. “Some bias is always inescapable. But. Well.”

Their mother’s hedging.

Their mother _never_ hedges.

Lavi leans forward on the table, rapt, their elbows firmly resting on their homework, but their mother doesn’t even notice. She’s not looking at them. She’s not even looking at the notebook in front of her, Lavi realises suddenly: oh, she’s staring at it, but her pupils aren’t moving like she’s _reading_ it.

“Well?” Lavi asks, curious. Her mother’s fidgeting, rolling the pen between her fingers. She’s _never_ seen her fidget before. And she’s not _saying_ anything, even though she should. She’s just letting the silence hang. “.. mom?”

“Patience, Lavanya,” she says, flat, and then glances upwards. “She’s your cousin.”

Lavi’s seen Anya before, hanging around Xaviul like his ginger shadow. She’s long-limbed and tall, with a beak of a nose and eyes that are almost the same shade of blue as Lavi’s favorite pair of contacts. She doesn’t look much like them. She doesn’t look much like their _mother,_ either, but.. her mother’s blonde, they think. They’ve seen her in town before, and -

“Is her mum Dad’s _sister?”_ they ask, wrinkling their nose. “She’s so _tall!_ ”

Their mother looks at them, eyebrows furrowing. “Your father,” she repeats, like they asked if the sky was green, and Lavi flushes. “Why would - no. Not your _father._ Anya’s father was my brother. Ravi.”

She pauses. “The one who died.”

Lavi doesn’t want to sink under the table at all, now.

Lavi knows a little about their mother’s history. The Vankamamidi’s have been in Redacre since the start of the town, one of the very first families to have moved in, and they’d had six children, total. All of them had left the town, when they were old enough to go to college. Of those, all but two of them had come back. Lavi’s auntie lives in Washington, D.C. She’s a senator, they think. They’ve only visited once or twice. All Lavi can remember is warm hands, the smell of coconut, and the stark white buildings that’d seemed impossibly large.

The other one was her uncle, Ravi. Their brother was named after him. No one had ever said _how_ he’d died, and Lavi had never asked. Their father’s father had died when they were four years old, and no one ever spoken of the death, or him, much at all. Dead relatives were just one of those things, Lavi figured, that were like a mouse in the house: you plugged the holes, you laid out poison, and you never directly discussed it at all. It’d been an unspoken rule, they’d thought.

But their mother was breaking it, one hesitant word at a time. “He died before she was born,” she says, slow. “And June - we weren’t sure, at the time, if he _was_ the father. The baby didn’t look like us. And June had her father, to help with it, and she never reached out to us. I didn’t think.. we didn’t think it was necessary to intervene.”

“But she looks like Ravi. And Xaviul’s mother said - she _sounds_ like Ravi.” She takes in a deep breath. When it comes out, it’s heavy and slow, like there’s a weight on her chest that she can’t get off. “Her mother should’ve said,” she says, turning back to her notebook. “If she couldn’t handle her _child,_ she should’ve said, and we would’ve taken her, before.. any of this happened.”

“Why didn’t she?” Lavi asks, rapt. They’ve seen more emotion on their mothers face in the last five minutes than they think they’ve seen their entire life. They almost wish they could record it, because none of it fits her. Their mother’s grief is like an ill-fitted jacket, and no matter how much she pauses, how slowly she takes it, everyone can see her discomfort in it.

Lavi’s mother’s mouth’s a thin slash in her face, but that’s not _too_ different than usual. Lavi thinks they’ve seen their mother smile a handful of times in their life, and it’s been so rare, they can remember each one of them. It’s not that she’s unhappy, their father explained to them when they were young. She just didn’t see a point in showing much emotion.

But Lavi can hear the contempt in her voice, now, and in the set of her jaw. It’s fascinating. Lavi’s tried to get reactions from their mother before, time after time. They gave up on it last year, after they’d broken a vase and their mother had simply had them clean up the mess, with scarcely a comment past not running indoors. Their mother just didn’t _care_ about things enough to react, not in any way that Lavi could read.

Except that’s not true. Anya’s not even here, but she’s pulling more emotion out of Lavi’s mother than Lavi’s managed over twelve years.

“She’s too proud. Pride, Lavanya, is the greatest fall of mankind. Because if you think you know everything..” She taps her pen, exactly once, against the page. “It means that you know just enough to act like a _fool._ Anya is your kin,” she says, like each word pains her. “She is your kin, and we do have responsibilities towards her. Ones that I have _ignored,_ given that.. well.”

“We can all behave foolishly, sometimes.”

“Speak to Xaviul, Lavanya. Find out about her.” She sighs, and lays down her pen. “Let us know,” she says, pained, “how badly we have fucked up.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


## MAY 30TH, 2███

When Lavi opens their eyes, they’re not in their bed.

“Oh,” they say, aggrieved, stretching out their arms in front of them. There’s a tingling numbness in them, stretching from the wrists up to their shoulders, and their fingers might as well be dead sausages at the ends of them. When they try to curl them, it’s strange: their fingers are moving, but it’s like watching a film. They can’t feel it. They can’t be sure they were the one that moved them at all.

When they touch their hair, they don’t feel it, either. But they can see how their hands come back with dirt.

If you sleep in the boxcar, you won’t wander at night. There’s a sort of static around the whole thing, Dax says. It keeps Speak-as-One out of your dreams, and - Dax doesn’t _say_ this, but everyone knows, it lets the other daimons in. It’s the boxcar kids that’re the one that have Laugh-Last or the others stomping through their brains every time they close their eyes. Lavi sleeps at their house, and they’ve never worried about anything at all.

Except, apparently, now.

They’re not sure where they are. It’s dark, almost too dark to see, but there’s a light in the distance. “This isn’t funny,” they call out, but the words just echo back at them. If anyone’s here, they’re not responding.

“I know you’re here,” they add, softer. “You can’t fool me.” They’re moving one step at a time, feet barely leaving the ground as they feel each step in front of them. It’d echoed when they’d spoke louder, and the air reeks of mildew and damp. They must be in the Maze.

And the Maze, years ago, was a mine. Speak-as-One must have led them here, and they hadn’t let them die on the way in.. but Lavi isn’t sure they trust them to keep them alive on the way out. “I’m not scared of you,” Lavi calls out, louder this time. Their voice sounds very harsh in the darkness. It sounds, they think, _bold,_ authoritative, like they’re packed to the brim with confidence.

It’s a lie. There’s sweat on their palms, and a lump in their throat. But Lavi’s always prided themself on their lies.

They’ve never been _possessed_ by something. Not once, not _ever_ , even though the other kids have: Lavi’s always woken up in their bed, their hands and feet clean, their mind blissfully blank. They’ve never even dreamed, not even the once. They think too much in the daytime to want to waste their time on it during the night! It’d only been rational, they’d thought, to choose not to waste their time on that, and it’d never struck them as strange. They’d thought of it as a piece of _them,_ something unique and undefinable, like their laugh, or the way they smiled.

But there’s gravel under their shoes, now, and dirt on their hands. When they peer down at their wrist, the letters flash: _4:15AM, MAY 30TH._ They wouldn’t wake up for another two hours, on a normal day.

That could be plenty of time to go and wash their hands, take a shower, and slip back into bed.

When they were younger, Lav had woken up sore, sometimes, like they’d run a marathon, their bones creaking and their joints aching when they’d finally rolled out of bed. Their father had always laughed, and said it was poor sleep, that they were too full of energy to hold still even while they were unconscious. Their mother had bought them a new mattress, and a weighted blanket, and it’d only ever happened a few times since.

There’s no poorer sleep, they suspect, then being fucking possessed.

“I’m not _fucking scared_ of you,” they say again, sour. It’s still a lie. They know it’s one, and Speak-as-One would, too. They’ve studied the daimons with Josh, and they’ve asked every kid in the clubhouse for their experiences. They know how they work, Lavi thinks, better than almost anyone else, except maybe Xaviul or Tommy. Everything they feel, Speak-as-One can see.

Everything they think, Speak-as-One can hear. “I’m _not,”_ they say, and it’s a lie, but it’s one that they need. If they say it enough times, they think, then they’ll believe it - and if they believe it, then it might as well be true. “My parents won’t be happy if you get me _killed,_ dude, or, like - I get, um, toxioplasmiosis in my lungs? I don’t think you guys sweep down here! I don’t think you guys clean at _all._ There’s probably bat guano.”

“If I die of _bat guano,”_ they say, vicious, “my parents are going to _hate you.”_

There’s no response.

The light, when they reach it, is just a spotlight dangling from the ceiling. But there’s tiles starting to appear in the ground, half-hidden in the dirt, worn away from what must be thousands and thousands of feet stepping over them. And in the distance, there’s another light, and next to it.. a door.

When they open the door, they don’t _scream,_ but it’s pretty close.

Lavi’s first, sickening thought is that they’ve stepped back outside. It _feels_ as if they must: they can hear wind rustling through the leaves of the trees, and smell the scent of water in the air. The sky is dark, darker than they’d expect, but there’s just enough light that they can see clouds swirling across it. And there’s trees all around them, towering green giants.

But the trees of Redacre’s woods have never been this tall, and their bases have never been this thick. If Lavi wrapped their arms around one of these, then they wouldn’t fit - and as they step closer, away from the doorframe they’ve been huddling in, their eyes adjust to the light. The shapes in front of them take form, from green blurs and impressions, to something more concrete.

They aren’t trees at all. It’s wood pillars, green paint sloughing off of the sides in chips and flakes, and what Lavi had mistaken as the rounded corners of a trunk is just _vines:_ thick, knotty looking things, wrapped like garden twine around the edges, with leaves that shimmer gently in the breeze as they stare. The pillars stretch as far as their eye can see, and when they tilt back their head, squinting towards the tops --

They’re not just pillars. They’re _platforms,_ twisted and built upon - not like a _stage,_ but like they’re matching to a design that Lavi can’t see. They’re not words, they think. They don’t look like the alphabet of any language they’ve ever seen. But they’re _something,_ all stacked on top of each other in a twist of wood and platforms, something so familiar that it makes their throat ache with the need to say a word they can’t figure out.

It’s more than just an ache: it _hurts,_ to look at them.

So they don’t.

Speak-as-One is trying to scare them, hauling them down here. Lavi _knows_ that, in the same way they know they must be deep, deep underground, somewhere in the core of the Maze, because - they might’ve done something like this, if they were some vast, terrible god. They’re a daimon, but they’re human, too, somewhere in the core of it, and parents have always tried to scare their children into compliancy.

They want Lavi to be scared, and Lavi -

“You’ll have to do more than just _this,”_ they say aloud, and start walking.

They can’t see the ceiling, but they know that they can’t be outside. Those aren’t _trees._ And there’s none of the sounds that Lavi’s heard in the night, out on patrol for the club: no hoots of the birds, or chatter of insects, or _anything,_ save the stutter-hitch of their own breath, the breeze, and the sound of water, somewhere off in the distance. So they pin their gaze to the floor instead, and start stalking, one step at a time, steadily towards where they think the water might be. There’s a wind blowing through the room, gentle but persistent: it pushes against the leaves, rustling them enough that Lavi almost can pay attention to those, instead of the sound of their bare feet on wood. The wood’s damp. The air smells like plants, and mold, and…

Water, coursing maybe a hundred feet below them, visible through the gaps in the floor. It’s pouring like a stream of oil: too dark to see in itself, but given form by the light refracting off of its surface.

There’s a guardrail between them and the drop, but it’s such a _long one:_ Lavi’s grown up with cliffs, and drops, and _rivers,_ but they’ve never been this high up before, not even once in their life, and looked over the edge. It feels like the weight of the river’s dragging them towards it, as steadily as a moon in orbit. If they blinked, they think, they might fall right in.

Their hands ache. They hadn’t meant to grab the rail, had never had the thought - but the metal’s biting into their hands, cold as ice, so slowly, they let go. And slowly, they take one step back, and then the next. The room feels off-kilter, like the wood’s shifting under their feet, but they know that’s not right.

It’s all in their head.

Maybe _all_ of this is in their head, because they’d never heard anything about a river below the town, before. It’s not on any of Dax’s fucking _maps._

“I don’t _like this,”_ they say, and their voice quavers at the end, a hitch that’s almost a sob. The sound’s like a slap against the face. They’re back against one of the wooden pillars, now, the leaf of a vine tickling at their nape, and they _hate_ \- they hate the idea that Speak-as-One’s _winning,_ but even more than that, they hate the idea that they’ll _know it._

There’s fury roiling in their gut, a heat strong enough to cut like a lighthouse through the fog, and Lavi clings to it. They might be scared, but they don’t have to _show_ it. Speak-as-One only wins if they _let them._

“I don’t like this at all,” they say, and fury makes their words sharp. “I want to go home! If you don’t take me home, right now, I’m going to - I’m going to fucking -” There’s no threat that holds weight. There’s nothing they can _do_ to a daimon. They’re not real.

They’re not _real,_ the way anything else is, and how can they hurt a daimon? They don’t have a _body._ They don’t have a _heart._ There’s nothing down here they care about, nothing that Lavi can hurt, nothing they can use to _punish them_ for trying this -

Except there is.

Their fury is like a warmth that’s coiling through their body, inch by inch, pulsing under their skin. If they don’t keep a hand on it, it’ll rip right through.. but Lavi’s always prided themself on keeping their temper in check. The heat is just _warmth,_ right now, enough to chase away the cold, but they won’t let it burn them. They won’t let it eat away at their sense.

Lavi’s always prided themself on staying in control, too, even if everyone around them’s tried to take it from them.

“If you don’t take me home, right now,” Lavi says, icy, smoothing a hand over their hair, “I’m going to throw myself off of the rails _right now,_ and then _everyone’s_ going to hate you. The club’s going to hate you, because - because guess what?” Their mouth is dry. But keeping their voice steady and stable is taking up all of Lavi’s attention. The only way to lie to a daimon is if they lie to _themself._ “I’m _way_ more popular than _Bells,_ and I’m _younger,_ and I’m _cuter._ And my _parents_ will hate you, and so will - so will _everyone in my family,_ and you know what? I’m related to, like, four _fifths_ of _everyone in town!”_

There’s no response. There’s _never_ a response, when they want it: only when they don’t mean for it to come at all, but that’s fine. Lavi takes a deep breath. They know Speak-as-One is watching, and every move counts.

The only way to lie to a daimon is to lie to yourself.

Their feet drag with every step back towards the railing, but - they shouldn’t be tired. They’ve been unconscious the entire damn night, and they’ve been asleep, no matter what their bodies been up to. They’re not _tired,_ they decide suddenly, dogged, and if they are, it doesn’t matter, does it? Because they’re not here to be _controlled._

And that strange feeling of gravity is back, as they lift a leg over the rail. It feels like their bones were carved from stone, but that’s just _fine_ . It works with what they want right now, and it doesn’t matter that it’s so heavy that it _hurts_ : if they get tired, maybe the inertia of it all will drag them over the edge alone.

The chill of the metal cuts right through their pajama pants, and the curl of their hands on the rails. If someone had shoved needles through their palms, it’d have felt kinder than _this._ But the pain keeps their head clear, and there’s a brittle kind of satisfaction to it all.

They tighten their grip on the rail.

They hope Speak-as-One can feel it.

“Fuck _off,”_ they call out, and their voice doesn’t hitch this time. “I’ll do it. I’ll _absolutely_ do it, you fucking _brainworm -”_

Their eyes close.

**BOLD WORDS.**

It’s so _bright._ They always forget how bright it is, even though it’s not real. (Is any of this real? Are they here at _all?_ But that’s the sort of question that has hysteria bubbling up in their throat, so they swallow it down, shove it to the back of their head.) It’s like staring into the sun, and before, they’d always jerked back. They’d always turned _away,_ and peeled open their eyes, and fought to keep them open afterwards.

They don’t open their eyes until the pressure is gone, this time.

They’re not standing at the rail. They’re back among the fake trees, sitting on the ground underneath one, their head leaned back against the ivy. A droplet of water oozes down their cheek.

Lavi presses their hands to their mouth, because otherwise, they’ll start screaming.

“That’s not okay,” they say, muffled, furious, fingers curling in. Their stomach’s churning. There’s bile in their throat, pushing at their teeth, and they have to swallow hard just to keep it down. “That’s not okay. _Stop moving me!”_

The pressure settles. They squeeze their eyes shut, because -

Lavi won’t be _controlled._ They won’t! But if it’s an apology -

**YOU WISH US TO SEE YOU AS LOYAL, BUT YOU WOULD THREATEN US?**

Can letters hold contempt? Can letters hold _judgement?_ They don’t think so. The only emotions that exist are the ones that they assign to it, and right now, the only thing they can process is the fire-hot burn of their rage. They want to puke. They want to hurt something. They want -

“I’m not threatening you,” they say, low. “It’s -” Their voice’s back to shaking, but now it’s rage, they think. They _hope_ . “It’s -” If they lose their composure, then Speak-as-One wins. “Fuck off! I’m -” They take a deep breath. “It’s a statement of facts. It’s the _truth._ It’s what’ll happen, if you don’t - if you don’t just let me _go home._ My parents love me more than they love _you.”_

“My entire _family does.”_

**THE BONDS OF THE FLESH ARE MEANINGLESS.**

“Not to _them,”_ they hiss, but -

Their mother had ignored Anya for years, out of spite alone. No one spoke of their father’s father. Ravi had died, alone and afraid, probably, at the bottom of the leap, and -

Speak-as-One could’ve saved him, they think. But they didn’t, and all that the Vankamamidi’s had done was move on.

“They’re _not,”_ they say, but it’s a lie, and they - Speak-as-One - they both know it.

There’s tears clouding their vision. Part of them wants to just lean their head forward, bury it in their knees, and try to go to sleep: their body feels like it’s been soaked for weeks and weeks in water, until each part’s too heavy to even lift. It’s spite that keeps them awake, and the rage burning fever-hot in their gut, and somewhere under all of that, fear.

The last time they’d fallen asleep, they’d ended up down here.

Where might they end up next?

When did they sit down.

Maybe the exhaustion’s why they don’t have to close their eyes, right now. There’s leaves rustling gently above them, and they pull their knees up close to their chest, burying their chin into them, wrapping their arms tight around them. The shadows are shifting on the ground, pooling together like water, seeping through the cracks in the wood. When Lavi leans down to dip their fingers in them, they expect them to come back damp.

It’s like touching nothing. It is touching nothing, because -

“Oh, you _motherfucker,”_ they breathe, as words form on the ground in front of them. The shadows are shimmering, shifting, unable to hold still, because they’re not _real._ They’re not real at all.

**DO NOT WEEP, CHILD.**

They _hate_ them.

 **YOU WILL NOT COME TO HARM,** the shadows say, and they hate them, they _hate_ them, so much more than anything else they’ve ever encountered. They hate them more than anything, except, right now, maybe themself, because there’s a cold comfort to the words.

Lavi knows they’re a liar. But trapped down here, with ivy at their back and the river under their heels, they want nothing more than that lie.

“I’m scared,” they admit, burying their face in their knees. This isn’t weakness, they think. They’re just - changing the terms of the game, that’s all. They’re still in _control._ “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I just - you could _kill me._ You could kill me, and -”

Ravi had died, and their family had forgiven Speak-as-One for his death. Had the Vankamamidi’s loved him, before he died? Had his parents looked at them the way that Lavi’s parents looked at them?

Her mother had loved him enough that she’d named her son after him, and that she’d wept, thirteen years after his death, when she’d spoken of him. And she still followed Speak-as-One, and she still spoke of them with the reverence of a god.

Would she still speak of them that way, if Lavi died?

Would their parents _notice?_

“I’m scared,” they say, and now they _are_ weeping. It’s a sticky, _stupid_ sound, the sort of sound that a child makes, and they don’t know if they hate themself for it, or if they hate Speak-as-One for causing it. “I’m sorry. Can I go home?”

 **DO NOT FEAR,** the shadows say. They’re creeping closer to them, curling around their feet like tendrils of the water below them. This close, the words are clearer. The shadows are brighter, and.. it could be comforting, Lavi thinks, if it was coming from anyone else.

**DEATH IS A WASTE OF GOOD FLESH.**

Or _anything_ else.

“You’re horrible,” they say, fervent. “You’re _horrible,_ and that’s -” They tear their eyes off of the wood. There’s just stone wall past the railing, pitted with darkness, and off, farther down, so faint they can scarcely see it, a rickety steel bridge. Somewhere in this fake forest, they think, there must be a ladder. And if there’s a ladder, that’s a way out.

They don’t get up. They don’t know if it’s fear that’s making their limbs heavy, or exhaustion, or the _daimon,_ but - when they press their hands to their eyes, pushing the palms in, they’re shaking.

They could leave, but how far would they get? How long would it take before they blinked, and they’d find themself back here, their back against the wall, and ivy in their hair?

How do you fight against something that can control you?

“Am I good flesh?” they say, venomous. “Am I? I’m, like, _thirteen,_ dude. I’m - I’m fucking _useless._ I don’t know why you brought me down here, or why - why you even _answered -”_

Their eyes itch. This time, they don’t fight it. They close their eyes.

**NOT WITHOUT USE TO US, CHILD.**

And the rest of the words die in their mouth.

 **YOU CLAIM TO WORSHIP US,** Speak-as-One says, but it’s not words, exactly. They can see the shape of them against their lids, and it’s more than just words, if they pay attention, in a dozen of different ways. Because it’s not just English. It’s not English at _all,_ now that they’re paying attention.

Lavi’s never dreamed. But if they had, they think it might’ve been like this: the letters shifting and swirling against the red pulse of their eyelids, trying to form into something that makes the hair on the back of their neck rise with the sight of it. One moment, it looks like the curls of Telugu, or the swoops of Hebrew. The next moment, it’s all sharp edges, the ruler-straight lines of English. It’s as fickle as the shadows they’d watched, like it doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Or like it’s trying to adapt, settle into something they’ll find familiar, as if anything could make the pulses of colour - the pulse of the _light -_ soothing at all.

It’s not English. It’s not any language they know, now that they’re paying attention, but Lavi understands it all the same.

**YOU WISH US TO SEE YOU AS LOYAL,** Speak-as-One says, and there shouldn’t be a tone to it. But they can hear it in their mother’s voice, almost, with the familiar attitude - the _derision -_ she always has, when she’s telling them what they’ve done wrong.

Their mother loves them. She doesn’t respect them, but she loves them very much, more than she knows how to show, more than she’s capable of _dealing_ with. Lavi knows this, the way that they know that the sky is blue.

**AND YET…**

And to speak as one is an act, their mother had told them. All of them were a part of the daimon, and the daimon was a part of them. Lavi knows why they’re pausing, when the lights finally fade out of their vision. They’re familiar with this game.

Speak-as-One wants them to be _afraid._

Hadn’t they done the same with Josh?

**YOU DO NOT SACRIFICE.**

All of the town fed into Speak-as-One, like rivers into a lake. Speak-as-One is their mother, they think, as much as they are their father, and their family, and even _them._

Their mother loves them. They _know_ this, just as they know their father does, and their family. They love themself. And what that means is -

Speak-as-One must, too.

“I’m tired,” they say, voice muffled. They shift, pulling their knees in tighter. The water is crashing against the cave walls, for all that it must be a hundred feet away, with the way the sound echoes, it might as well be right in front of them. “Can we -” They swallow. “Can we take a break and talk about this in the morning?”

**OH, WE CAN SOLVE THAT FOR YOU.**

They’re just not very good at showing it. That’s fine. Lavi’s used to that by now.

Lavi draws in a long, shakey breath. “No need for that,” they say, slow, like their heart isn’t racing. They’re never going to sleep again, they decide suddenly. It shouldn’t be hard. They could manage it: they’ve seen the energy drinks, with their bold lettering, shouting about _TWENTY FOUR HOUR ENERGY._ If one drink gives you that, then they think that half-a-dozen might make sure they never need to sleep again at _all._ “No need for that at all.” Part of them wants to laugh, but what comes out is a strangled kind of sob, instead. “No need for that at all, dude.”

“Look! I’m down here. And I can’t - _pull a Hoadley_ on you, we’ve totally, like, established that. And I can’t leave.” Their throat’s tight. They force themself to swallow, and then they take a deep, deep breath, until their lungs ache with the effort of it. Their eyes want to close.

They don’t let them.

“I’m still _talking,”_ they say, waspish. “Interrupting is _rude._ I’m down here, you’re down here - _we’re_ down here - and you’ve - you’ve got my attention, I guess. So congrats! What did you want to say? What was so fucking _important?”_

“Because the rest of the daimons - your kids - they just leave _voicemails,_ y’know. They just talk to us in _dreams.”_

If they never closed their eyes again, it might be a solution. That might be how they could _win_ over Speak-as-One, once and for all. But that - it’s not any better than being _scared,_ is it? It’s still letting them control them.

And besides, they think, as the shadows shift under their feet, the daimon doesn’t need their eyes shut to make themself known. It doesn’t need anything from Lavi at all.

 **PART OF YOU WANTS IT ALL TO END,** the shadows murmur. The wind is still blowing through the cave, a gentle breeze that catches their hair and the vines behind them. It almost sounds like voices, when Lavi isn’t paying attention to it: like someone’s saying something, and if only they focused, they’d understand.

It’s just a breeze. There’s nothing down here except for them, and Speak-as-One.

 **YOUR KIND WERE NOT MEANT TO WAKE.** The shapes are soft. It’s hard to focus on them through the haze of tears, but Lavi’s finding they don’t need to, exactly: the words are forming in their head, as easily as if they’d been reading them out loud. **THIS WAKING STATE.. IT IS LIKE CANCER. ONCE, WE WERE ONE. ALL OF US. ONE INTELLECT, ACTING IN CONCERT.**

“And then we woke up,” they say, and the wind shifts. It’s blowing towards them, now. It smells like the water, and dust, and something soft and familiar, familiar enough that they want to lean into it.

Above them, the leafs brush against their neck, gentle as a caress.

**YOUR FEAR. PRIDE. SOLITUDE..**

“I’m not _solitary,”_ they protest. “I have friends. I have the club -”

**WHERE ARE YOUR FRIENDS NOW, CHILD?**

Lavi doesn’t have an answer to that.

 **THIS IDENTITY YOU CLING TO..** Something sighs. It might be the wind, they think. Or it might have been them. **TO BE ALONE RENDS YOU APART. IT IS A TUMOR. A CREEPING SORE.**

**BUT ALL PAIN..**

**ALL SUFFERING..**

“It can end,” Lavi says aloud. “Thanks for the sales pitch. Can I go home?”

**WE DO NOT BRING HARM.**

**YOU ARE IN PAIN.**

**WE SEEK TO SAVE YOU.**

“Maybe I don’t want to be _saved_ ,” Lavi says, and closes their eyes.

Speak-as-One loves them, the same way that their parents do, the same way that the entire town does. Lavi knows this, down to their core. It only makes sense. It didn’t bring them down here to _hurt_ them.

But for all that it loves them, Lavi knows: it doesn’t respect them.

And that’s more exhausting than anything else.

Time passes. They don’t know how much. They’re so _tired,_ all the way down to their bones, but it’s not just physical: it feels as if their very soul’s fallen into the river below, and all they can do is close their eyes to it.

The daimon isn’t wrong.

That’s the worst bit of it all: they aren’t wrong at all.

They haven’t the energy to lift themself from the ground. They don’t have the energy to even open their eyes, and so Lavi doesn’t. They rest their forehead on their knees, and they sit there, the leaves tickling at their nape, the breeze pushing over their skin. Their anger has extinguished. All that’s left is that sinking, awful chill, and they can’t dredge up any emotion, right now, to chase it away.

Lavi only realises they’ve fallen asleep when something grabs hold of their shoulders and jerks them upright. The light’s blinding when their eyes open. They can’t focus at first: everything’s just colours, and blurs, and it’s _too much,_ all at once, for them to process. Something’s holding them. There’s wind in their ears.

Or.. no, they realise suddenly. It’s not wind. It’s _voices._

There’s hands on their face, in their hair, on their body - pushing and patting and tugging at them, like they’re trying to make sure that Lavi’s real. But it’s not aggressive. It’s desperate. And touch by touch, piece by piece, the warmth’s coming back to Lavi’s skin, and their brain slowly, slowly wakes up in response.

“Oh, thank _God,”_ the girl says, and rattles something off in Brazilian, or Spanish, or whatever it is that she speaks. Lavi doesn’t remember. Right now, Lavi doesn’t _care,_ because the face clicks into place, all at once. The beak of a nose, the paper pale skin, the piercings that glitter in the limited light - it’s _Marie,_ and Marie’s grabbing them, pressing them to her like they might disappear.

“Hi,” they say, and it hurts to talk. Their voice rasps like sandpaper. “Hi. Marie?”

“Tommy said he saw you _walking in the woods,_ Lavi. In the woods! And he called out, and you didn’t _respond,_ and he just -” She buries her face in their hair. Behind her, Tommy’s peering in every direction, a flashlight in his hand. When he spots them, he smiles at them, a little brittle, and mouths: _“I’m glad you’re okay.”_

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Marie says aloud, muffled. “You’re coming to my house, yeah? Or I’ll come to yours. Or - or we’ll figure it out. Thank the heavens, I thought - we were afraid -” She pulls back, drawing in a deep, long breath. Marie’s dark eyes are shining. “Never mind what we thought.”

“I’m so glad you’re okay. Oh, _gato,_ your _face_.”

When Lavi reaches up to touch their cheek, their fingers come back wet.

“I’m okay,” they say, as much to soothe Marie as themself. “I don’t know how I got here.” Their cheeks are wet, and it hits them, suddenly, they’re cold - cold enough that they’re shaking with it, even around the weight of Marie’s arms. “I don’t know how to get out.”

“We’ve got it covered, gato. Don’t worry.” Marie lets go of them, but not all the way: she keeps an arm looped through Lavi’s, her fingers twined tightly through theirs. “We didn’t bring coats,” she says, regretful. “But we’ve got a fast way out. Don’t worry.”

Tommy settles in on their other side, though he doesn’t loop his arm through theirs. “Don’t worry,” he says, with a sidelong smile. “Trust me, kiddo. We’ll get you back home before your parents even wake up, okay? It’s only about, like, twenty minutes from your house. And we’ll keep people outside, so you can’t go wandering again. Or do you want to go to the clubhouse?”

Lavi can’t muster up the words to respond. Their throat aches, and their eyes sting, but more than that.. it’s starting to feel like they’re waking up, for the first time that night. Marie’s fingers through theirs - the warmth of Tommy next to them - it feels so much more real, than anything else they’ve managed.

Maybe they just fell asleep.

“They can’t go to the clubhouse,” Marie’s saying. She’s talking to Tommy, but she keeps squeezing Lavi’s hand, like she’s making sure they’re still there. Tommy says something back, but Lavi can’t focus on it. They’re so _tired_. And with Marie steering..

They don’t have to be in control. They can just relax, for the first time that night, and with that thought, it’s easy to just let their eyes close.

Orange, as brilliant as the sun.

**SLEEP WELL, LAVANYA.**

**GRACE AWAITS.**

  
  


* * *

  
  


## JUNE 20TH, 2███

It doesn’t happen again. Lavi goes to sleep, and they wake up in their bed, their hands clean and their feet unmarked. Some of the older kids, on their patrols, have taken to peering into their house, but they’re always asleep.

If Speak-as-One is taking their body at night, again, there’s no signs of it.

And Lavi doesn’t see their voice.

But they keep thinking about it all, day after day, every time their mind has a moment to wander. It’s like an itch they can’t scratch! Lavi’s never liked mysteries, and the daimons present the worst kind of mystery of all: something vast, and unknowable, and _near,_ because they haven’t even got the courtesy to be far away.

Lavi never has to worry about all the things they don’t know about Jupiter, because it’s in space. There isn’t anything it can _do_ to them, when push comes to shove: oh, it’s vast, and unknowable, and terrifying, but there’s hundreds of thousands of _millions_ of miles between them, and if it so much as shifted in orbit, it’d be centuries before the consequences reached them.

But Speak-as-One is in their town, and every time one of the adults look at them, Lavi wonders who’s really behind their eyes.

So Lavi doesn’t let their attention wander. They stay focused on something else, instead, something so much more manageable than any theological abominations: for the first time in their life, they start paying attention to Anya Littlefeather.

It’s strange! They’ve never paid her much mind before. She’s just like the opossums that sometimes get into their trashcans at night. When you look at her for too long, she postures and she _hides,_ and Lavi’s always been kind about it. They’re pretty great, they think, and they can see how it’d be intimidating to someone who lives out in the woods.

They’ve never really paid much attention to her past that benign generosity. It’s been easy to ignore her. She doesn’t come to school most days, anyhow, and when she does, she never stays for long. And when Lavi asks their mother if she’s homeschooled, their mother just looks at them, eyebrows furrowed.

“Her mother works for the Voice,” she says, crisp. And only their mother could make a name sound like an insult: “- _June_ wouldn’t have the time for it.”

Their mother has never been one for much emotion. Lavi knows that she loves them, in the same way they know that the sky is blue, but they’ve never thought that their mother might be able to stir up enough emotion to _hate_ someone. It’s fascinating in the strangest kind of way that she’d ever be interested in Anya, because at first, when Lavi starts watching Anya, all they can _see_ is June.

Anya’s got the same long face, and the same long features. Her nose’s the same beak as her mothers, prominent enough that it takes up most of her face, and only just barely softer. She’s got her mother’s eyes, blue as cornflowers, and her mother’s broad shoulders, and her mother’s _height._

But the more that they watch, the more they’re starting to see all the ways that Anya’s like _them_. It’s not looking in a mirror, the way it is with some of their cousins. Padme is just like Lavi, and their mother, and their grandparents before them: short and small and dark, with a build that’s softer than it is sharp, and eyes that never quite want to open. Roald’s pale, like Lakshmi and Anya, but he’s still got the same face, the same sharp edges to his jaws.

It’s not looking in a mirror. It’s like looking at their own shadow: the shape’s the same, but the details are all different. Anya looks like her mother, mostly, long-limbed and thick-boned, with shoulders and a face that look like she’s already as old as Gwenna or Dax. She’s tall, and pale, and _freckled,_ and no matter how much Lavi squints, they can’t get past the nose.

But above it, she’s got the same eyes as Lavi, even if they are bleached pale. She’s got the same ears.

And when Lavi spots her smiling, once, at Xaviul, she’s got the same dimples, for all that her face’s squarer, and her eyes crinkle in the same way.

They only see her smiling once, because when Lavi enters the room, Anya always gets _annoyed._

"I just think," Lavi says, morose, "that if I died, she would _have_ to love me."

"That sounds a little fake," Xaviul says, eyes fixed on his laptop.

There was a great, big, empty hole in their chest, one that felt as if it bled every time that Anya looked at them. Lavi couldn't patch it. They couldn't fix it, though they'd tried, and they couldn't die, although sometimes the weight of it all hung so heavily that they almost wished they would. If she'd just ripped their heart straight from their body and bit it, then Lavi thinks that might have hurt less. But instead -

"- it's like I'm a shark, and she's a seal, but instead of just eating my liver, she rips it out and spits it on the ground. So I'm still dying, but, like, now it's worthless? Now it doesn't mean anything at all," they say, with a wet snuffle. "I'm just bleeding everywhere. Emotionally. It's super gross."

Xaviul isn't looking at them. They do it again, but louder.

"Here's a tissue," he says, distracted, flinging it at their head, and then: " - Lavi, that's orcas."

“The animal doesn’t _matter!”_ They’re sprawled across the floor of his living room, their face half-buried in the thick fur shag of the rug. They’d walked to the library earlier, and come back with their backpacks laden in books. Xaviul’s reading his, some treasure trove of mythology, and Lavi’s _supposed_ to be reading theirs, but..

“I wish I knew why she _hated me,”_ Lavi moans, rolling onto their back and flinging their arm across their head. “She’s just so mean to me, Xavi! I want her to like me! We should be _friends!”_

“You don’t have to be friends with everyone I know,” he informs them. “That’s kind of weird.”

They haven’t told him that they’re related to Anya. Xaviul likes them well enough. They’ve grown up together, loosely, in the same way that all of the Redacre children have, but.. Anya’s his age, give or take, and when push comes to shove, they think he likes her better.

It’s a hurtful thought. It’s a frustrating, impossible thought, that anyone could like someone better than _them,_ but - it’s impossible that their family worships some eldritch demon, and they’ve come to accept that. When their grandmother had told them at their bat mitzvah that thirteen was a difficult year, Lavi had never expected _this_ is what she’d meant.

“I don’t care about her being _your_ friend,” they snap at him, scowling. “Your friends suck! Except for me. And they’re _boring._ And _weird._ I just - I - we’d be _really good friends,_ if she’d just let us. I can feel it in my _soul.”_

“Do you have a soul, now?”

Lavi squints at him. “Are you saying, like, Jewish people don’t have _souls?”_ they demand, sticky sweet. “Because that’s _mean,_ Xaviul! Like, that’s a _crime!”_

“I’m not saying _Jewish_ people don’t have souls,” he says patiently, turning the page. “I’m saying you don’t. And, besides, you’re half Indian.”

“Are you saying Indians don’t have souls?” they cry, popping upright and slapping both hands to their mouth. “That’s _really_ racist! And - and - _you’re Indian!_ You can’t say that!’

Xaviul finally lifts his eyes from the book. “I’m _Peskotomuhkati,_ Lavi.” He pauses. Lavi knows a trap when they hear one, and they don’t say anything else: they just wait, and watch, while he does the same. Their games _always_ go like this! He’s just setting them up for a fall!

But they can’t help it. Curiousity wins out. It _always_ wins out. “That isn’t a real word,” they accuse him, tentative. “You’re fucking with me, dude. It’s, like - you said you were -” Is this what he’s trying to make them do? Fumble on the pronunciation? Because he’s just watching, pleased, and Lavi half-expects to see feathers dangling from his mouth. “Pasma -” They take a breath. “Plasmacodi?”

“Passamaquoddy. And I’m _both._ Is Peskotomuhkati too big of a word for you?” he teases, and then he smirks at them, so smug that Lavi wants to smother him in the rug. “You can’t just call people _Indian,_ you racist. We’re not a monolith! But I guess if it’s too hard for you to _remember_ , you might as well skip the pretense, and just call us _injuns,_ if you’re just going to _lean in -”_

They throw their book at his head.

And Lavi then leans over, snatching his book from his hands, and they start drubbing him with it just as he starts laughing.

“If you’re going to be mean to me,” they huff, slouching back to the ground, “I’ll just go _home!_ What are you even reading about?” They flip open the book, but it might as well be in Spanish, for all the sense it makes: each paragraph has to be five sentences thick, and they _think_ it’s covering the government, but they’re not sure. “Are you, like, gonna be a -” They squint down at the page. “- _CIA_ agent now?”

“No. Anya’s dad might’ve been one,” he says, snagging it back. “And Bambi said that the Voices might be a government conspiracy, or something from Green Bank, but I don’t _think_ so. We’re in the radio-quiet zone, but we’re not part of the base. And CHORUS isn’t named like they do.”

“That’s dumb. _Bambi’s_ dumb.” The book’s _useless,_ is what he might as well have said, and Lavi slams it shut, slides it back over to his portion of the floor. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Green Bank,” they huff. “Green Bank doesn’t have anything to do with _anything._ Our parents don’t even like the military. Roald told his mum that he was going to join the Navy, and she threatened to send him back to _India_ if he kept it up.”

“Maybe they’re working with the military secretly.” He doesn’t really believe it. Lavi knows it, and he knows it: there’s none of the passion he’d have if he _did._ Xaviul thinks too much, and talks too little, but he’s always been toothy when he finally decides that he’s _right._ “It’s not likely,” he says aloud, like he could read their thoughts. “But it’s worth investigating. We need information, Lavi. And we can’t keep snooping on our parents _forever_ . Bambi’s looking at the military, but it’s not like we can just _ask.”_

“Sure we can,” Lavi says, and rolls their eyes. “We could ask the _daimons._ They could actually, like, earn their fucking _keep_ for once.”

Xaviul laughs. It’s not quite a funny laugh: it’s more of just a sharp _bark_ of a sound, closer to an exhale than anything else, and Lavi’s rolling over to see his expression before it’s even quite over. He looks wry, his lip curled into something that’s not exactly a smile, and..

That’s _interesting._

“ _Are_ we asking the daimons now?” Lavi asks, pushing themself up into a slouch. “I mean, like - we’ve always _asked._ But they don’t answer.” A beat. “Are they answering?”

“TID said he’d answer questions,” Xaviul says, “in exchange for sacrifice. So Tommy made a sacrifice.”

That’s interesting. Lavi sits up, folding their knees against their chest, settling their chin on top of them and looping their arms around the whole. Tommy Sato: the most popular boy in the school, practically speaking, and the apple of most of their parents eyes. Lavi had considered being competitive with him, once, but he’s got a head over them, and he plays soccer. They can’t compete with _soccer._ They’re too _small._

“Tommy’s sacrificing to _TID?_ ” they repeat, wrinkling their nose. It’s safe to say the other daimons names aloud. They don’t go _snooping,_ on average, the way Speak-as-One will.. but Xaviul’s always skirted on the side of caution. There’s no point in stirring up trouble, he says, if they don’t need to, and Lavi can’t disagree with _that._ “Why?”

“He says he’s valiant, and brave, and he deserves it.” Xaviul rolls his eyes. “I don’t think -”

“Why is he _sacrificing?”_ they demand, and then pause. “ _What_ is he sacrificing?” They can see a picture in their head, but surely.. “Is he just - like - he’s not -”

Lavi’s read so many books since they first learned about the daimons: books about religions long gone, about religions newly born, about mythologies and fairy-tales and every scrap of human morality that’d ever been written down on the page. They’d never given much thought to morals, before the daimons had begun speaking in Redacre. They’d never had the _need._

To be moral, their father had taught them, was to act for the benefit of mankind: to treat others as they wished to be treated, to never hold out a blade when a hand could suffice instead.

To be moral, their mother had taught them, was to make the choice to be so. Every action was something they had chosen, and morality came from the thought they'd put into it. One man's vice was another man's virtue, and all that the individual could do was perform their duties, and embrace a dharmic life as best as they could.

It all sounded very simple, when their parents had put it like that. And it was the sort of morality that they’d seen throughout all of their reading. Lavi had told Josh that to succeed, a person had to be willing to sacrifice, but they’d never thought it would be _literal_.

In one of the books, the king of Mycanae’s god had called for a sacrifice. And so Agamemnon had slit his daughter’s throat to bring his armies to Troy, and to bring justice upon the Trojans. The book had presented it as moral. Agamemnon would have died in her place, if he could have.

But he hadn’t.

His daughter had been Lavi’s age, when she’d died.

They swallow. “It’s not _literal,”_ they say, eyeing him. “It’s - a metaphor, right? They don’t want us to, like, slit our _throats_ for Cthulu, right?”

Xaviul shrugs. “I don’t think so.” His mouth twists to the side, contemplative. “It’s abstract. A kind of metaphor? It’s not about sacrificing - _blood,_ or burning a goat, or whatever. I watched Tommy do it,” he admits.

“And you didn’t stop him?”

“I’m not his _mom._ He can make his own choices,” Xaviul says, and Lavi puts their hands on their face, drags them down hard enough that the skin pulls with it. _Maybe some people shouldn’t be allowed to make choices,_ they want to argue, but Xaviul’s still talking.

“It’s not literal,” he says again, biting his lip. “You light a lighter, you light some candles, you stand in front of the mirror, and you talk to them. The daimons. You talk, and then you close your eyes, and when they open them.. sometimes it’s not _you,_ apparently.”

Xaviul looks longways at them. “Like you, and --”

“I didn’t _sacrifice,”_ Lavi snaps, and smacks his side. “It’s not the _same._ Why would anyone do that voluntarily? Why would you just -” _Give up control._ “- let them treat you like a _flesh-suit?”_

“TID says that, when we sacrifice, it helps them help us. I don’t buy it,” he admits. “Not from him. And neither does Dax: he thinks that Bells sacrificed, and that’s how she ended up going missing. If they fuck it up in our bodies, it’s not _them_ that faces the consequences, is it?”

“It’s us. Tommy said we’re just sacrificing time, but.. it’s not just _that_.”

“We’re sacrificing _life.”_

  
  


* * *

## JUNE 21ST, 2███

“I’m not going to die for you,” Lavi says in the darkness.

They’re in the maze. Sitting here in the rafters above the library, they can see _everything_ , for yards and yards: the slow teeter of the sleepers, arms outstretched as they try to find their way - the skitter of a rat, fifty or more feet down - a lucid, cigarette clutched awkwardly in her mouth as she fumbles to put one of the wooden tiles back on the wall. It’s not a night for a mission! Marie, Xaviul and Astro are out and about somewhere above ground, doing their own thing, and Gwenna had told Lavi to just stay home and sleep.

But Gwenna has never been the boss of them, no matter how pretty her eyes are, or how funny she is when she and Marie start being mean to each other. Lavi had waited until their _parents_ had been asleep for two solid hours, and then they’d crept off to the maze, anyway.

They don’t know why. But it’d felt like they should, for this conversation.

Their feet dangle over the edge of the grate, while their fingers dig tight into the holes. No one can see them, this high up, while they’re hidden away in the shadows. No one can _hear_ them, either: Lavi’s certain they could start shouting, and the sleepers wouldn’t look up. There’s just such a distance between them! And there’s wind blowing through gaps in the ceiling, gentle enough not to push, but just strong enough that Lavi thinks they’d carry their voice far, far away.

Or maybe they wouldn’t. There’s a nauseating kind of thrill to sitting this close to danger. Their feet are dangling over the edge of the platform, and there’s _nothing_ under them, not for yards and yards. There’s a nauseating kind of thrill to sitting this close to the edge. They can feel the ground pulling at them, and it’d be so _easy_ to fall.

They’re not going to fall, just like they’re not going to be heard.

Some of the kids act out for attention. They act out to prove that others will save them, if they err, or that others will act to stop them. It’s like a game of tug-of-war, where if both sides pull, neither’ll end up in the mud.

Lavi’s never been interested in being saved. And _that’s_ the thrill to this all: even if they tipped all the way forward, they wouldn’t _let_ themself fall. They’d save themself.

They’re in control here.

It feels like it’s the only place in their life they are.

Gwenna and Dax lead the Blackout Club, in so far as they have any leaders, but Tommy’s one of the biggest chambers in the heart of it. He’s like a major artery, Lavi thinks, or the epitome of what half the kids want to be: someone bold, someone brave, someone that’s as big as the adults in size as well as personality. He sets the pulse to which the rest of the club beats, and if he’s sacrificing, the rest’ll follow.

If they haven’t _already._

Anya has pretty eyes. Who’ll be looking out from behind them, in another month or two?

“That’s what sacrifice _means,_ isn’t it? It means I’m willing to die for you. And I’m _not._ I’ll help you out,” they say, flippant, kicking out their legs, “but I’m not doing it because you’re _right._ You’re not. You’re old, and you’re outdated, and, like - this isn’t sustainable! I don’t know how you ever thought it _was._ What’re you going to do, when our parents die off?”

“Because, like, let’s face the fucking _facts_ , here. Your PR sucks. People want cities, and flash, and - _people,_ and we don’t have any of that, here. We’ve got a single theater! That’s sort of _bunk._ And we’ve got a single school, and our downtown’s _lame._ Even if it wasn’t for the cult, like.. I don’t know any kids that want to _stay_ here. If things were okay, they’d get old, and then they’d _leave.”_

Lavi rummages in their pockets. They’ve always got candy in their pockets, or tissue, or sometimes, the bones of something small and newly deceased they’d found on the ground to haul back to Skeg. But right now, they don’t have so much as a single _pebble,_ never mind a stick of gum.

Whatever. They don’t need distractions _anyway._

“And right now,” they say, “I don’t think anyone’s convinced we’re gonna get old at _all._ People say Bells is dead, and you did it. You’re scaring away your own _people,_ here. That’s - like - it’s not _sustainable._ And if all the kids grow up, and we leave, like - how’re you going to get new people to come in, if you can’t even keep the ones you _raised?_ You need us to stay. _”_

Speak-as-One is in their head. All of the daimons are, and so pausing for dramatic effect - it’s kind of _pointless,_ all things considered. But Lavi doesn’t care. There’s no point to any of this, if they’re honest.

Will Speak-as-One listen to them?

Their mother doesn’t. But their father does, sometimes, if they push him hard enough, and Speak-as-One is _both_ of them, somewhere in the core of it all.

Speak-as-One is a part of _them,_ somewhere, and that’s what Lavi is banking on.

“And you need us to stay safe. But you already know that, right? You’re _trying.”_

They’d told Josh that Speak-as-One was like an ill-trained dog. It’d been bravado! They’d just been trying to convince him to _listen_ to them, and to prove that they knew more than him. They hadn’t needed it to be true.

But they think they might’ve stumbled onto the truth anyway.

“TID, all the rest - they don’t care if we die. One of them’s, like.. their _name_ is about killing us. DFY, right?” Some of the kids favour him, they want to say, but the words stick in their mouth like taffy. They don’t want to think about that. But -

Honestly, they don’t want to think about _any_ of this, but if they don’t, who _will?_ Lavi would love to trust the club leaders. They’re older. They’re _supposed_ to just be able to let them handle it all, just like they should be able to let their parents. But the very fact the daimons were talking to them meant that their parents had _already_ failed.

And the fact the club leaders were listening to them wasn’t much better.

“His name’s DFY, and he’s going to get us _killed_ ,” Lavi says, sour. “The other kids.. I just.. you fucked it up, dude. You fucked this all up _real_ bad. The entire club’s so terrified of _you_ that we’re all just - just trusting the guy who tells us to slit our wrists for a _cause._ You’ve got them so rattled, like, they’d literally rather _die._ And that’s not okay! Even Dax is only, like, _sixteen.”_

“We’re not supposed to be thinking about if we’re going to _die_ here. We’re supposed to be _safe_ , here _._ ”

“Isn’t that why you made Redacre? Isn’t that why you tried to keep the other daimons _out?”_

Lavi had read so many stories, the last two months. They’d read through their mother’s copy of the Vedas, and their father’s copy of the Tankah. They’d read books on myth, and books on religion, and they’d read the _news,_ even, digging through the library’s archives to see what they could turn up. They haven’t found anything really on the daimons, not things that’d listed them by name.

But the information they’d found, they think, is more than enough.

Abraham was the most beloved of his god, Lavi thinks. He was the chosen of him, in the same way that kids spoke of Bells, the way they were starting to talk about Tommy. He had loved his god, and his god had loved him, and one day, they'd said: bring your only son, the one whom you love, and raise him as a burnt offering in the lands of Moriah.

So Abraham had taken his son to the land of Moriah, and he'd bound his wrists, and he'd tied his arms, and he'd placed him upon the altar. But he hadn't been like Agamemnon. He hadn't been like Harishchandra, who's god had asked him for his son, and who had hidden him away, instead, and bought another to sacrifice instead.

“People came here, because they thought they would be protected,” they say now. “My thataguru, my ammamama - they wouldn’t have been able to get married, back in Telugu. My _parents_ wouldn’t have been able to get married, probably, anywhere else. Their parents would have _killed_ them.” Their cousins still looked a little lost, every time they remembered that Lavi wasn’t a proper Hindu. “Like, maybe even _literally._ And here -”

“Ravi died. And Hoadley died. But - people die in hospice all the time, right? You can’t stop death,” they say, “but.. we can do our best. And we can do _better._ ” They’re leaning forward, their fingers holding tight to the grate. The ground feels like it’s impossibly near. It looks impossibly _close._ “Everyone’s scared of you, because they think you’re going to get them killed. And they don’t _get_ it.”

“You’re trying to protect us. You’re not very good at it,” Lavi says, “and you’re doing a kind of really shit job at it, but - you’re _trying._ You don’t want us dead. You don’t want us _hurt._ You just want to make sure we’re safe, and that we’re away from the other daimons, and for everything to go back to the way it _was,_ before any of this started.”

“That’s why you’re trying to control us. It’s not because you’re awful. I mean - you are kind of awful. But it’s - you’ve got good _intentions.”_

Abraham's god had tested him before, in the past.

And so Abraham had brought his god his son, and he had lifted the blade -

And he had tested his god in turn.

“So I’ll work with you! We’ll figure out a way to save everyone,” Lavi says. “And we’ll figure out how to do this, except _better._ Because people never want to be _controlled._ They don’t like feeling like _puppets.”_

“So, like, the key thing is - we just need to make sure they never realise they’re on strings at all. How’s that sound?”

They take a breath, and close their eyes.

There’s nothing. Nothing but darkness, and the sound of their own, ragged breath, and the gentle breeze of the library across their face. They count to sixty, slowly and carefully. They don’t let themself think of what could happen, or what might happen, or where they might be, if they open their eyes.

When they open them, they’re still on the grate, their fingers looped tight.

Lavi exhales.

“Okay. _Okay,_ ” they say, and they don’t know what they were expecting.

But they’re not dead. And they feel, almost, like maybe, just maybe, for the first time in their life, they’re being taken seriously.

“Okay,” they say again. “That’s the first step. Thanks for listening.”

  
  


* * *

## JUNE 25TH, 2███

The tree outside of Mrs. Robinson’s house is the sort that Lavi’s not technically allowed to climb.

If they’re honest, they’re not allowed to climb _any_ trees. They’d scampered up one when they were six, dared by Skeg and curious about if there were really squirrels in the nest, like they’d claimed. Lavi hadn’t believed them. Squirrels being in a _nest_ just hadn’t made much sense.

It’d turned out there were squirrels in the nest, and Lavi had gotten so startled at the sight of them that they’d fallen right out of the tree, and broken their leg in two different places.

It’d healed up just fine. But their parents had forbidden them from trees ever since, and so there’s a vicious kind of satisfaction in resting among Mrs. Robinson’s sturdy branches. It’s an old tree, with branches about as thick as Lavi’s weight, and more leaves than it knows what to do with. When they’re leaned back against the trunk, no one can see them, but they can see everything.

It makes it useful to spy.

Speak-as-One doesn’t possess the same kids every night, or the same parents. There’s a sort of logic to it, Archer claims. He thinks there’s a pattern, and he and Tommy and Gwenna have been chewing away at it, night after night, trying to figure out who they can expect to rise on what night. It’s linked into the tasks, they think, that Speak-as-One needs performed.

And to test out their theory, they’ve left club members scattered across the town, positioned at the most likely candidates. So Lavi’s waiting with their cellphone hidden neatly inside of their jacket, the light of the screen hidden, for the front door to open.

They’re ready when it does.

No one can see the Lucid’s faces. Speak-as-One is always in their heads, even when they’re not speaking to them: no one could see the red doors scattered across town, too, before Bells had shown them how to look. Knowing it’s a hallucination, though, has never made it less creepy.

The Lucid’s face looks like something’s writhing underneath the skin, bulging out past the skin before it coils back down - or, sometimes, before it just _splits_ open to reveal an eye, or teeth, or darkness. Once, Lavi’d spotted the wet slip of a tongue, sliding over teeth. It’d been horrible. But they still always look, squinting, just to see if they can peel back the mirage.

If it’s a hallucination, they _should_ be able to.

But for all that they know that it’s Mrs. Robinson walking out of the home, they can’t see her face underneath it all. The features shift and merge and mold into new configurations, but none of them look like her, and none of them settle long enough to look like anything at all. It’s frustrating, the amount of control that the daimons have over the children of Redacre, but it’s one of the things, they think, they could change.

If Speak-as-One could place this sort of gauze over their vision, then Speak-as-One could remove it.

If they asked.

Or if they _made_ them.

Lavi watches, patient, as what must be Mrs. Robinson wanders across the street. She knocks on the door, too soft for them to actually hear, and then dawdles. A few minutes later, it opens. Bambi steps outside, her eyes closed, and behind her, her mother falls in step.

Mrs. Robinson goes to three other houses. The same routine happens, time after time, and then, at the last house, another Lucid steps out. Lavi doesn’t know who lives there, so they take note of the number and the street, and then they wait.

After ten minutes, the group disappears over the hill.

After twenty minutes, Lavi pulls out their phone, and sends off the information they’ve observed to Headquarters.

They could go home after this. Dax and Gwenna don’t let people work by themselves, if they can help it. The buddy system of two kids per endeavour isn’t just about making sure nobody can showboat. It’s about making sure that everyone comes back _home,_ because they’ve never lost a kid in the Maze or above ground, but all of them are aware that it could happen. But most of the club members that were available tonight are stationed around the town, writing down what they see, and recording evidence. There isn’t much else _to_ do. They could go home.

Lavi stays in the tree, instead, listening to the rustle of the branches, and watching the street.

When Tommy pops his head out of the nearest house’s window, looking up towards their tree, they’re surprised, but not _terribly._ Everyone gets bored on patrol, but Tommy’s the worst of them all at it, Lavi thinks. Lavi’s social, but they can manage a whole day without an audience, even if they want to cry at the end of it.

Tommy can barely manage _two hours,_ and he helps create the schedules.

They’re a little surprised that he wants to talk to them, though.

He heads right over to the tree, climbing up it with an ease that Lavi resentfully admires. They _hate_ people that’re taller than them, but most of the older kids are. And Tommy Sato is three whole years older than Lavi, making him one of the oldest kids in the club. He knew Bells, and Dax, and Gwenna, all before any of this started: Bells and him had played soccer, back when anyone still felt like _playing_ during the days. 

Lavi doesn’t pay a lot of attention to people’s faces, usually, but Tommy’s is impossible to miss. He’s not handsome, they don’t think, but people can’t help but stare when he walks into the room. It’s like he’s got an energy that shines right through his skin, and demands the eye. It’s like - when he walks into a room - everything starts rotating around _him._

It’s admirable. It’s _infuriating,_ if Lavi’s honest, and if they could rip out whatever part of him has it and take it for their own, they would. People think of them as cute, and charming, and _young_ , but Tommy.. people _respect_ him. If he was older, he’d be more famous than the president.

He grins at them, all perfect teeth, as he settles into the tree branch. He’s got a nose to match Anya’s, all big and beaky, but on him, it just suits his face. “Howdy, kiddo,” he says. “Patrol over! I’m here to walk you home. But first - you ready for a riddle?”

“I’m too pretty for riddles,” Lavi says, and cracks their gum.

He laughs, and it’s just as infuriatingly bright as the rest of him. Lavi doesn’t know if they hate him, or if they want to be him. Maybe both. “You’re too little to be pretty. Sorry! Try again in, like, five years.” _Definitely_ both. “It’s a good riddle,” he teases. “I’ve already asked everyone _else._ ”

He doesn’t look like he’s lying. “I thought you were on patrol,” they say all the same. “Did you skip _out?_ ‘cause, like, that’s not cool. We’re doing _science.”_

“I didn’t skip out. I used this handy-dandy fucking device that we old folks call a ‘cellular telecommunications device’. You might know it as that thing you play your fucking weeb shit on.” Tommy’s bad at playing, Lavi thinks. He always goes right past joking, and into actually drawing blood.

“I’m not a _weeb,”_ they protest with a frown. “Don’t be mean to me!”  
  
“Then answer my riddle three, kiddo. Here’s the question.” He leans back on the branch, kicking his legs out in front of them. The branches rustle, but they don’t break. With anyone else, Lavi’d worry about him falling out, but with Tommy.. he always acts as if the ground itself would move if he asked, and it’s just so easy to believe. “Would you rather fall asleep, and never wake up, or would you rather die?” he asks. “Sleep or death! Picking neither means you’re a fucking cheater.”

Oh.

Their eyes feel impossibly wide, and there’s heat flooding their face, all the way from their core. “I -” The words turn over in their head, but they can’t quite process them. They don’t make sense, not when they’re strung together like that, but.. at the same time, they make an awful kind of sense. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean, dude?”

“Would you rather sleep, or die?” he asks again, but he’s smiling at them, wry, as he takes in their distress. “Calm down, kiddo. I don’t have a fucking gun in my pocket. It’s not a trick question.”

“It’s an awful queston,” they say hotly. “I don’t want to - why would you even _ask_ that?”

“You’re getting so _upset._ Jesus, I forgot you’re, like, twelve.” He reaches over, patting their shoulder, and his hand is so much colder than the night’s air. It feels like they’re touching dead flesh, and they flinch away at the thought. “Calm down,” he soothes. “Look, I’m sorry. We just thought it was a fun question! You don’t have to answer -”

“You can’t just ask people if they want to _die,_ Tommy!”

“Calm down -”

“Stop telling me to _calm down,”_ they snap, and they shove him.

They’re not expecting him to actually _fall._ Maybe he isn’t, either, because there’s a flash of his wide eyes - then he’s flailing - then he hits the ground, with a _paft_ that leaves Lavi’s heart still. He’s lying there, limp and motionless, and they can’t quite draw the breath needed to speak.

When he pops open an eye, they exhale, all at once. “I’m just fine,” he calls up, sour. “Thanks for asking --”

Lavi peels off their shoe, and throws it at his head.

“If you come back up here,” they snap, “I’m going to beat you to death with the other, dude! It’s not cool! You don’t just get to ask people if they want to _die!_ Did anyone say yes? I’m going to tell Dax, if they did. Did _Xaviul_ say yes? Because I’m going to tell his mother, and then she’s going to beat _him,_ and then she’s going to beat _you -”_

“Hey. Hey, calm down, okay? There’s _Lucids_ out, Lavi,” he says, softer, and they swallow the rest of their words. Their face’s flaming red hot. They wish they’d thrown their other shoe at him, just because. They wish a Lucid _would_ come, and drag him away, because right now, he’d deserve it.

Would they rather _sleep or die?_

Who would ever answer _die?_

“I hate you,” they say unhappily. “Who said _yes?”_

“Don’t worry about it.” He’s sitting up, now, and picking leaves carefully from his hair. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Lava. I’m sorry.” It’s late enough at night that, if Speak-as-One didn’t exist, they’d probably have woken people up. But the adults who stay in their bed at night are as much under the daimon’s thrall as the ones that wander. No one ever wakes up, no matter how much noise they make. And there’s no Lucids here, tonight.

Still, Lavi doesn’t say anything, not until they’re sure that they won’t shout.

“You’re always trying to upset people.” He is. They’ve watched him bait half of the boxcar, just to see who’ll bite, and normally, they find it funny.

Normally, it’s not directed at _them._

“I wasn’t,” he says again, lying through his teeth, but Tommy’s always been a better liar than them: people believe Lavi, because they can’t imagine they’d ever lie about half the things they do. People believe Tommy, because he makes them _want_ to believe him. “I promise. We were just _curious.”_

_We’re._

Tommy sacrificed to Thee-I-Dare.

There’s a chill running all the way down to their bones, sharp enough that they want to cry out. They pinch their lips tight instead, fingers digging hard into the branch underneath them. They’ve got soft hands. The bark _hurts._ But they don’t let go, not until they’ve managed to swallow the sound down.

Does Tommy look any different? they wonder, distressed. But they don’t think that he does. He’s got the same sleepy smirk, the same heavy lids. There’s nothing new to his expression. There’s nothing new in his _cadence._

The children and the lucids are long gone. They’re all possessed by Speak-as-One, they think, and on the children, some of the other kids say you can see it. They claim their eyes are open, but they’re always rolled back. They claim they talk about things that only they can see, and they don’t respond to the people around them, not at all.

You can tell when a sleeper’s possessed. They walk jerkily, unsteadily, like someone wearing a suit two sizes too small. The kids do that, too.

Tommy sits like he fits perfectly in his own skin. But he said _we,_ and that’s what Lavi’s mind keeps circling back to, distraught. He sacrificed to Thee-I-Dare. He sacrificed, and now he was saying _we,_ and he was -

“ _Gosh._ We? And who am I speaking to?” Lavi says, sugary sweet, for all that their stomach is sinking right past their feet and into the roots of the tree. “Tommy, or Thee-I-Dare?”

Tommy’s brow furrows, just for a moment. Then his expression smoothes. “Does it _matter?”_

“My parents said I shouldn’t talk to strange old men pretending to be children,” Lavi says crisply. He’s not denying it, part of their brain wails. _He wasn’t denying it at all._ “Even if they _are_ demons. Or, like - _especially_ if they’re demons.”

“You sound like Marie.” Tommy flips his hair forward, and then runs a quick hand through the red strands. There’s no more leaves left in it, but it looks neater, when he straightens up. If it weren’t for his rumpled clothes, they wouldn’t have thought they’d shoved him at all. “Are you _Catholic_ now? Don’t start on that. They’re _gods,_ Lava.”

“They’re false prophets,” they shoot back. “The only people running around calling them gods are the Lucids, dude. Are you a _cultist,_ now?”

Tommy laughs.

“In the end, dude, this shit’s gonna make cultists of us all. Nah,” he says easily, “you’re talking to Tommy. Did Marie talk to you about sacrificing? She’s been on my ass since I said I’d done it. I told her, shit, go to church and buy an indulgence to get some chill, but that just made her _angrier._ Girls, right?”

“Maybe if you weren’t such a _dick,”_ Lavi says, “all the girls wouldn’t _hate_ you.”

“Naaah. They never hate me for long.” He shrugs, peering up at the sky. “It’s not as bad as everyone thinks,” he says, and it makes him sound older, when he gets serious: less like a fifteen year old, and more like the adult he’s going to become. “Sacrificing - it’s not a big deal. It’s not like we’re all sitting in a circle and drinking the fucking Koolaid, here. I got Bambi to do it, too.”

Everyone says that Tommy’s the best of Redacre.

It makes it all the worse that he’s betraying it, and he doesn’t even have the courtesy to _care._

“It’s just, like.. you’ve got doors in your head, right? And you’re giving them the key to one of ‘em. So sometimes, they’ll move your body around, or they’ll use it to go look at something they need to see. But for the most part.. you can’t really tell.” He shrugs, but the motion’s not dismissive, for once. It’s just thoughtful. “I don’t know where Thee-I-Dare starts, sometimes,” he says, “and I end. I don’t know what thoughts are him talking to me, and which are me talking to _myself.”_

“But it doesn’t matter,” he says, “when we want the same thing.”

“And what about when you don’t?” Lavi asks.

Tommy shrugs. He’s pulling himself to his feet, carefully wiping wrinkles out of his clothes. There’s dirt smudged across his jeans: when he rubs a hand over them, it just smears. “I think we’re way, way off from ever having to worry about that,” he says, rueful. “We want Bells safe. We want our parents back. We want Redacre _freed._ We don’t want some eldritch fuckface _controlling_ us, and our parents, and our friends. We want people to stop going missing, and for Redacre to be _freed.”_

“Does anything really matter, past that?”

“When Thee-I-Dare asked me,” he says, “I told him that I’d take death. Because some shit is worth dying for, Lavi. Now, c’mon. Let’s get you home.”

* * *

## JULY 4TH, 2███

When they set the lighter down on the table, the flame catches their finger.

“Goddamn it _all,”_ Lavi snarls, stepping back. Their thumb wasn’t in it long enough to get actually injured, but flapping it doesn’t do much to soothe the bone-deep ache. If their friends knew they were doing this, they’d have their neck.

But Lavi knows how to keep a secret.

Lavi hasn’t seen swoop nor line of Speak-as-One since they woke up in the maze. But, even with the distraction of Anya, it’s still bothering them. The first two nights after their possession, they’d slept over at Marie’s house, although they’d had to beg and beg their parents for the opportunity. It’d been their mother that’d relented, in the end. “She can help you with your maths,” she’d said, and that’d been that.

Marie had stayed up all night for them, just to make sure they didn’t get out of bed. Lavi hadn’t been able to sleep, even with that. Every time they closed their eyes, now, it felt like they couldn’t _breathe,_ not until the lights had dimmed, and no letters formed in front of them. And then they just held their breath until they opened them, and confirmed they hadn’t moved at all.

“At least you’re not having nightmares about it, chico,” Marie had said, smoothing back their hair, and Lavi didn’t know how to say _that_ wasn’t a comfort, either.

But they couldn’t sleep at her house forever. They’d had to go back to their own, and.. there was nothing they could do, really, to make sure they didn’t sleepwalk. If they locked their door, then they’d still know they could unlock it. If they tied themself to their bed, their parents would’ve had to untie them, and they’d have had more questions than Lavi wanted to answer.

Lavi had never made a habit of telling the truth to their parents. Their parents were a different kind of creature than them, and they’d never seen the point in distressing them by the realisation of the depths of it: everything always went so much smoother when Lavi acted like the person people thought they should be. So they hadn’t told their parents anything about Speak-as-One, or the club, or anything that they’d been up to, and that ignorance had worked all the better for them.

Or maybe they weren’t ignorant. Maybe their parents already _knew._ Maybe everyone in the whole town knew, everyone save for the club, and Lavi just thought they were keeping a secret.

If anyone in the club knew what they were doing, they’d kill them. But -

“So, like, here’s the deal,” they say, turning back to the mirror. They push back their hair with a hand, and take a deep breath. “So! You could possess me again. And that’d be - that’d be pretty fucking awful, because.. I don’t want to wake up in the maze, or in the woods, or in, like, a drainage ditch? That’d be pretty bad. That’s.. how you drown.”

They sound weak. They sound _young._

Lavi purses their lips, takes a deep breath, and closes their eyes. When they open them -

They’re still in the room, for one, and that’s enough of a relief that they laugh, pressing their hand to their mouth. It’s an awful laugh. It sounds about as anxious as they feel, but that thought helps, a little. They can be anxious. Speak-as-One probably _expects_ them to be.

Well, fuck _them._ They’re not _going_ to be.

“I’m not going to drown,” they say, with more confidence as they kneel in front of the mirror. “You’re not going to let me.” That’s the trick to dealing with daimons: you have to buy your own lie, because if you feel any doubt, they’ll _know._ To speak as one is an order, they’d told Lavi, but they weren’t the only ones that could give an order. “You’re going to keep me safe. And I’m going to help keep _you_ safe. Because if the other daimons have their way, they’re going to stomp you out like a campfire, dude.”

“And you don’t deserve _that.”_ Would they rather sleep, or die? They wish they could strangle Thee-I-Dare with their bare hands. Or strangle Tommy. Or, they think, vicious: both! They’ve got two damn hands, don’t they? “You’re our _family._ You’re trying to help us. You’re trying to keep us _safe._ And I - I want to help with that.”

“I’m going to help with that,” they say again, rephrasing, because that’s the trick to talking to daimons: if they want respect, Lavi thinks, then they need to act like they’re _owed_ it.

When Abraham’s god had asked for a sacrifice, Abraham had thought himself clever. He’d brought up his son, and placed his blade upon his son’s neck, but he hadn’t slid it across. He’d stood there on the precipice of disaster, and he had waited, because a god that wanted the blood of his kinfolk was no god that he would follow.

And his god had balked, in the end: had knocked the blade from his hand, and had brought forth a lamb, instead, to burn as a sacrifice. He’d commended Abraham for his devotion, and his wisdom, and his trust, and in the end, nothing of worth was lost at all.

Lavi’s on the edge of disaster. They’re standing with one foot on the floor, and the other over the ledge, and they just have to trust that Speak-as-One won’t give them a push. It’s a test of their god, but they’re the one with the blade at their neck.

But they’d put the knife there themself.

Lavi's always preferred to stay in control.

“So let’s figure out how,” they say, and the lighter snuffs out.

* * *

# END OF SPRING

**Author's Note:**

>  _And then the captives arrived. A blushing queen of little more than twenty summers on her throne, and the whole flame–lit hall filling with noble knights on bended knee.  
>  "Whose prisoner are you?" "I am the Queen's prisoner, to live or die, sent by Sir Lancelot."  
> "Whose you?" "The Queen's, by Lancelot's arm."  
> Sir Lancelot—the name on everybody's lips: the best knight in the world, top of the averages, even above Tristram: the courtly, the merciful, the ugly, the invincible: and he had sent them all to her.  
> It was like a birthday party, so many presents. It was like the story books.  
> Guenever sat straight and bowed royally to her prisoners. She pardoned them all.  
> Her eyes were brighter than her crown._ \- **The Once and Future King**


End file.
